Prospecting for independent financial advisers
Know when a business owner in your county comes into money. Write to them first.
Patchlight watches every owner-managed company in your patch using public Companies House records. When a business is sold, or an owner reaches the age where succession becomes real, it drafts a short, personal email about that event. It sends under your approval, from your own mailbox, in your own name: every email individually at first, and automatically on the event once your wording is signed off, if you choose.
Dear Mr Ward,
I saw that Dalesway Joinery changed hands last month and wanted to say well done. Twenty-six years is a long time to build something.
If it would be useful, I am happy to talk through what usually comes next after a sale, with no obligation. I am based in Harrogate, so it could be over a coffee.
Kind regards,
[Your name, your firm]
Illustration only. The company and the names are invented.
How it works
Four steps. The last one is yours.
The engine does the watching, the reading and the first draft. Nothing sends without your approval.
Watch the patch
Every owner-managed company trading in your county goes on the watch list, kept current from the public Companies House record: accounts, confirmation statements, officer and PSC changes.
Spot the event
The engine looks for the moments when money moves: a business sold, an owner approaching succession age, and, where the filings show it, a large dividend drawn. Each flag carries the filing it came from.
Draft the email
For each event it writes a short, plain email about that business and that moment. No template blast, no mail-merge tells. It reads like something you would have written if you had the time.
You approve
Individually at first: you read each draft, change it or drop it, and approve. Once your wording is signed off as a versioned template, you can let it send automatically when an event lands, if you choose. Every email sends from your own mailbox, in your own name, and replies land in your inbox like any other email.
Wealth events
What counts as a wealth event
Three signals, all from the public register. Two of them are solid today. The third depends on what small companies choose to file, and we say so.
A business sold
Share transfers, a change in the persons with significant control, a new parent company. The owner has just had the largest liquidity event of their life, and many of them have no adviser at all.
An owner reaching succession age
Directors' month and year of birth are on the public record. An owner in their late fifties or sixties with a trading business has decisions ahead: exit, succession, and what the proceeds do next. The conversation is worth starting before the sale, not after.
Large dividends drawn
Where the accounts show it, a sustained or sudden increase in distributions to the owners.
An honest note: most small companies file filleted accounts that leave out the profit and loss account, so dividend visibility depends on what each company files. This signal improves as the public record improves. The first two do not depend on it.
We do not buy lists, scrape social media, or read anyone's private data. Everything the engine sees is on the public register at Companies House, and every email says plainly who it is from and why they are writing. A recipient who asks not to be contacted again is never written to again.
Exclusivity
One firm per county.
Patchlight is sold on county exclusivity. When a firm takes a county, no other firm in that county gets the service.
The business owners the engine finds for you are not being written to by three other advisers in the same week. That is the whole point of a patch, and it is a deliberate limit on how big Patchlight can ever be. We are comfortable with that.
Yorkshire is the founding region. Choose your county on the map.
Illustrative signals. Towns real, events invented. Tap a county to request it.
Boundaries: Office for National Statistics, licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2024. Ceremonial counties assembled from local authority districts (December 2024); Stockton-on-Tees shown whole within North Yorkshire.
Pricing
Pricing, stated plainly.
One monthly price for the county. Where it sits in the range depends on the size of the patch: how many qualifying owner-managed companies it holds, and the flow of events that produces.
For the small number of firms that sign a letter of intent before the service switches on. No payment is taken until it does.
- Exclusive use of the service in your county
- The watch list for your county, kept current
- A drafted email for every wealth event
- Every email under your approval, sent from your own mailbox
- A person to talk to, not a ticket queue
The same service at the standard price. Counties already held by a founding firm are not available at any price.
- Exclusive use of the service in your county
- The watch list for your county, kept current
- A drafted email for every wealth event
- Every email under your approval, sent from your own mailbox
- A person to talk to, not a ticket queue
The aim is one to four qualified meetings a month with the wealthiest unadvised business owners near your firm. That is an aim, not a guarantee: the flow of events in a county is what it is, and the meetings come from your emails, not ours. One new client a quarter pays for the service many times over.
Who we work with
Well-reviewed, trusted regional advisers.
We profile the adviser firms in each county before we approach any of them. We look for independent, whole-of-market firms with strong client reviews and a real local reputation: the advisers people in the area already trust.
That is what the service is for. It connects those advisers with the wealth being created in their own region, at the moment an owner most needs someone to talk to.
Independent, whole-of-market status matters because of who the engine surfaces: an owner who has just sold a business, is holding the proceeds, or is planning succession. They need unconflicted advice across the whole market, not a product range.
- Independent and whole of marketAdvice drawn from the whole market, with no product range to push.
- Strong client reviewsConsistently well reviewed by the clients the firm already has.
- A real local reputationKnown in the towns the firm serves, by name.
- A small teamSmall enough that the adviser who reads a draft is the adviser who sends it.
Compliance
Built for regulated firms.
What your compliance consultant will want to know: who communicates each email, who approves the wording, and what runs on every send.
- Every email is your firm's communication.
It sends from your firm's mailbox, in your adviser's name, and it is your firm's approved financial promotion. Patchlight drafts and delivers; it never communicates a promotion itself. Patchlight is not an advice firm and is not authorised or regulated by the FCA; it is software your firm operates.
- Wording is approved once, as a versioned template.
Your firm signs off the wording as a numbered version. Any change creates a new version, and a new version cannot send until it is re-approved. The engine fills only factual event fields: the company name and the event. Anything drafted freely by the assistant is approved individually by a person at your firm before it can send.
- Two modes, and firms start in the first.
Approve every email individually, or approve the wording and the targeting rules once and let the service send when an event lands. Every firm starts in approve-each mode and moves to the second only if it chooses to.
- Safeguards run on every send, automatically.
Companies only: sole traders and personal email addresses are excluded. Business addresses only. A one-line opt-out, honoured permanently. A complete audit trail of who approved what, when, and what was sent to whom.
- A compliance pack on day one.
A legitimate interests assessment for your firm to adopt, a data processing agreement, a paragraph for your privacy notice, and the recipient classification rules, written for your compliance consultant to review.
Founding places
The first firm to sign takes the county.
A small number of firms in each county have been approached, each as well qualified as the next. Once one of them signs, the county is exclusively theirs: no other firm in that county gets the service.
The arrangement is simple and it is designed so that nobody pays for a promise.
- Request your county. Tell us the county or area you want. We reply with whether it is still open and what the patch looks like.
- Sign a letter of intent. It takes the county for your firm and sets out what the service will do and what it will cost. It is not a contract to pay.
- No payment until the service switches on. Billing starts when your watch list is live and the first drafts are in front of you, not before.
Patchlight is not a mass-market product with lots of firms competing over the same leads. It is designed for a single firm in one region, and it works for them.
We are not building an enormous business. We are building a small business that works very well for a small number of firms. One customer per region. We work hard for them.
Built by a practitioner
Patchlight is built and run by Scott, formerly in wealth management, with a background in private wealth and alternative assets. The engine underneath it was built for a harder job: finding acquisition targets for private-equity investors by watching thousands of private companies, reading their filings, and writing to their owners at the right moment.
Patchlight points the same engine at a different question: which business owners in your county are about to need a financial adviser, and how do you reach them first, politely, in your own name.