EDMA

Thomsett Lockey is an M&A partnership in education and training. To advise buyers and sellers well it has to know the whole market: who owns what, who is buying, and which businesses are about to move.

That knowledge lived in two heads and a lot of tabs. Data subscriptions would have cost more than the firm wanted to spend, and the partners were clear that the system must never become a beast to maintain.

A single vault of linked notes for every company, owner, deal, transaction and signal in the sector, fed each day from free public sources: news, company filings and ownership changes, and government education data.

Anything that arrives from calls, email or the web lands in one inbox. A rules-based router files it to the right note, and anything it is unsure about goes to a person to sort.

On top of the vault, agents draft the work an analyst team would do: tiered buyer lists with a thesis for every candidate (always one non-obvious name among them), a deal radar that flags moves as they happen, and a ranked top five every Sunday.

The partners work from analyst-grade coverage of a global market, run by a small team. The engine sweeps the market every day and originates opportunities for buyers and sellers, instead of waiting for them to arrive.

The firm's public read of where capital is moving in education draws on the same vault, and so does its monthly market brief.

Nothing sends itself. The agents draft, the partners decide, and every note a machine wrote is marked as one.

Each deal sits behind its own confidentiality wall and nothing is ever deleted. The system acts only on instructions from a short approved list, and never opens a deal or contacts anyone on its own.