Deal Origination for M&A Advisory Firms

We’ll Build Your Firm a Proprietary Pipeline of Qualified Business Owners Considering a Sale With Our Direct Dealflow System in 90 Days

Our engagement works like yours: you only pay when the pipeline delivers.

We research your firm, your mandate criteria and your market before you commit to anything.

01The Problem

Every mandate you have ever won came through someone else’s relationship.

The pipeline you don’t control

Most of your mandates come from the same two or three people. A CPA. An attorney. A wealth manager. None of them work for you. If one retires or starts sending deals somewhere else, your pipeline doesn’t shrink. It’s gone.

Feast or famine

You have expensive people and lumpy revenue. When deals close, everyone’s busy. When they don’t, everyone’s expensive. The problem isn’t execution. Your firm executes. The problem is that new mandates show up when they want to, not when you need them.

Taking mandates you shouldn’t

When the pipeline is thin, you take the deal outside your sweet spot. The owner who wants a fantasy number. Those mandates burn your team for a year and don’t close. More conversations means you get to say no.

Referrals built your firm. But you can’t turn referrals up. When the pipeline thins, there’s no dial.

We build the dial.
02The Solution

The Direct Dealflow System

The Direct Dealflow System is a complete deal origination engine built around your firm’s mandate criteria. It reaches business owners who are thinking about a sale, before they call anyone. It brings them to a private, confidential page under your firm’s name. And it books them directly onto your partners’ calendars.

Here’s why it works. Right now, an owner who starts thinking about selling calls whoever their CPA knows. That’s the whole game. The firm that reaches that owner directly, before the referral chain starts, takes the conversation before anyone else knows it exists.

And here’s the part that matters most: almost no firm your size does this. Your competitors are waiting by the phone for the same three referral sources you are. That’s not a reason to wait. That’s the reason it works.

The Direct Dealflow System
How firms your size get mandates today
✓Owners come to your firm directly
Owners come through someone else’s relationship
✓You own the asset. It runs every month
Referrals arrive when they arrive
✓Volume you can turn up when the pipeline thins
No dial. You wait
✓You choose your mandates
Thin pipeline forces bad mandates
✓Cost per conversation is a known number
Cost of a referral relationship is years of lunches
✓Confidential, under your firm’s name
Public listings and marketplace competition
One system. One number on the dashboard. Deal flow your firm owns.
03How It Works

How an owner gets to your partner’s calendar

01

The right owner sees your firm.

It starts with a deep audit of your firm and your market. Your mandate, your sector, your deal history: that research shapes every message we write. Then we run structured creative testing until we know exactly what stops the right owner. Not “cash for your business.” Calm, direct, professional.

02

They watch your film and read your page.

Everything sits on one private page under your firm’s name. A short film that positions your firm as the obvious choice. Clear answers to the questions every owner has: confidentiality, process, what their business might be worth, what happens to their people.

03

They book the call themselves.

No forms to chase. No gatekeeping. A qualified owner picks a time on your partner’s calendar. Email follow-up keeps every owner who wasn’t ready warm until they are.

One team runs all of it.

Running this properly takes six different disciplines. Your firm deals with one team, one point of contact, one number on the dashboard.

Strategy & researchYour firm, your mandate and your market, mapped before anything runs.
Film productionScripted, shot and edited to position your partners as the obvious choice.
Page & copyA private, confidential page written in your firm’s voice.
Media buyingMeta and Google campaigns, managed and tested weekly.
Email & automationsFollow-up that keeps every owner warm until they book.
Tracking & reportingOne dashboard. The number that matters: cost per qualified conversation.
04Timing

The owners are selling. The question is who they call.

Nearly six in ten owners bringing companies to market right now are Baby Boomers, and most have no succession plan. The decision to sell forms slowly, and it forms in private. At the kitchen table. After a health scare. Long before the owner tells a single adviser.

No referral can reach that moment. The referral chain only starts once the owner starts talking. But those same owners are on Meta and Google every single day. A calm, confidential message from a credible firm is the only thing that can meet them while the decision is still forming.

The firm that gets there first takes the conversation before anyone else knows it exists. Every month your firm doesn’t have this system, those conversations are happening. Just not with you.

05The Offer

The 90-Day Pilot. Built, launched, optimised.

Month 01

Build

We map your firm, your mandate and your market. Then we build the complete system: the message that reaches the right owners, the private page that earns their trust, and the follow-up that books the call. You approve everything before it goes live.

YouOne strategy session. Approvals.
UsResearch, build, everything else.
Month 02

Launch

Your system goes live in your market. Owners who fit your mandate start seeing your firm. We refine the message weekly on live data, and the first owner conversations land on your partners’ calendars.

YouTake the first owner calls.
UsRunning and refining the system.
Month 03

Optimise

What works gets scaled. What doesn’t gets cut. The cost of a qualified conversation comes down week by week, and you finish with a pipeline review and a plan for the next 12 months.

YouOne pipeline review.
UsScaling and the 12-month plan.
06The Outcome

The outcome is simple. More signed mandates.

Mandates come from one place: sitting across from owners who are ready to sell. Your partners already win those meetings. The one thing your firm can’t control today is how many of them happen.

That’s what this system changes. It hands your partners a steady flow of qualified owner conversations, at a cost you know and a volume you control. More of the right conversations means more signed mandates. And you know what one mandate pays: the retainer, the success fee, what a good exit is worth. One signed engagement covers this system many times over.

Launched.Your origination engine live in your market, tracked end to end.
Managed.We run all of it. Your partners stay on deals, not on marketing.
Proven.A repeatable route to signed mandates that your firm owns.
07Results

The playbook is proven. The system is yours alone.

Every stage is there because it works: film, page, ads, follow-up, booking. Everything inside those stages is built for your firm alone. The film is scripted in your partners’ voice. The page is written for your mandate. The ads speak to the sector, the deal size and the geography you actually want.

Nothing is templated. Nothing is recycled. The pilot proves it on your mandate, in your sector, at your deal size.

08Founder

Built to make ad spend turn into booked deals.

I was trained to build and manage marketing funnels at MVF Global, one of the world’s leading customer generation agencies, managing seven-figure monthly ad spend. I applied those methods at Savills and Checkout.com, where I saw something that stuck with me: companies spending millions on advertising without a reliable system for winning new clients.

Clearscope builds one thing: complete deal origination systems for advisory firms. We handle everything. Strategy, film, page, ads, emails, automations. One team, one system, one number on the dashboard.

Tommy Higson Founder, Clearscope
Trained & Built At
MVF Savills Checkout.com
09FAQ

Before you book

You can. A good one costs $200K+ a year before they’ve won a single mandate, and most imported Rolodexes don’t transfer. The ones who succeed usually need a system behind them anyway. The pilot costs a fraction of one BD hire and builds the asset your firm keeps either way.

Cold outreach into founder-owners typically gets a response from fewer than one in a hundred. This is the opposite motion. We don’t chase owners. Owners who are already thinking about a sale see your firm, watch your film, and book the call themselves. Different mechanism, different result.

No, and this matters. Everything runs confidentially under your firm’s name, in the register your market expects. No “cash for your business.” No down-market look. An owner’s first impression is a calm, private, professional page. Most of your competitors will never see the campaign at all. Owners in your target market will.

Yes. The build is compliance-aware: your designated principal reviews and approves every owner-facing asset before launch, and the workflow is built around that approval step. If you operate under the M&A broker exemption, the process is simpler still. We cover this in the audit.

Here’s the honest sequence. Month one is the build. Owner conversations start in month two. Mandates come from those conversations on your normal engagement timeline, and you know your deal cycle better than anyone. What the pilot proves in 90 days is the number that matters: what a qualified owner conversation costs. Mandates and fees follow from there.

$40,000 over 90 days. $10K in month one for the full build, then $15K in months two and three, which includes $5K of ad spend each month. Everything listed on this page is included. No long-term contract. You keep every asset.

We do deep research on your firm, your mandate and your market before you commit to anything. Then we present a specific plan: offer, angles, targeting, economics. You decide if the pilot makes sense. If it doesn’t, you keep the research.

Your next mandate shouldn’t depend on who calls your CPA first.

The audit is free. We do the work first, so the decision you make is on a specific plan, not a promise.

Apply for Your Complimentary Dealflow Audit
No cost. No commitment. Built around your mandate criteria.