Requesting a report

There are two ways in, and they are not equivalent.

From a search — open it and choose Commission research for this search. The brief inherits the search's own: the market, the geography, the size band, the ownership, the off-limits list. You are not typing the same market a second time, and the report lands in that search's history.

From the dashboard — the Request a report button. Nothing to inherit, so you type the scope yourself. Use it for a one-off; open a search for anything you expect to come back to.

Two fields are required either way. Everything else is optional and only sharpens the result.

Commissioning a report is never what costs you anything: the charge is the search itself, once, when you open it. See what a search holds.

What we will build

The form opens with the products you can commission, each one named by the question it answers. Pick the question you actually need answered:

• Market Map — who holds this seat across the market, where they sit, what it pays, and how hard they would be to move.
• Talent map — who the people are, and where they sit.
• Opportunity brief — whether a senior seat is about to open at one company, and the reason to call.
• Opportunity monitor — which seats in your market are about to open, and why call now.

The catalogue grows. If only one product is available when you open the form, it is stated rather than offered, because a choice of one is not a choice.

The mandate

What the report should find. The outcome, in your words. "A CFO to hire", "acquisition targets in outpatient dental", "who is buying in Gulf Coast marine logistics". Not a topic — a result.

Field or market. Where it lives. Sector labels are broad, so be as specific as your mandate is: "commercial insurance brokerage" beats "insurance".

The brief. Free text, read in full before anything runs, and where a good brief separates itself from an adequate one. Worth putting in it:

• Who the report is for, and what they will do with it.
• The situation. A board that has lost patience reads differently from a founder planning ahead.
• What a great result looks like, concretely.
• Constraints you already know about.
• Anything you have already tried, so we do not hand you back your own shortlist.

Supporting files

A position profile, an org chart, a target list, a spreadsheet of comparables. One good document is often worth more than every optional field below it. Up to 8 files, 10 MB each, in PDF, DOCX, XLSX, CSV, PNG or JPG.

Anything you attach stays with your firm and the researchers on this mandate.

Sharpen the brief

Folded away by default, and none of it is filler — each field narrows where we look:

• Size or scale changes the research more than anything else here. It decides whether we work through public filings or through the sources that surface companies which never file. On a market map it describes the segment being mapped, not any one company.
• Ownership decides where the evidence lives: private equity in filings, family-owned firms in their own announcements, listed companies at the SEC.
• Exclusions are cheaper to give now than to strip out of a delivered report.

Leave a field blank rather than filling it to get past it. A guessed constraint is worse than none, because we research against it.

After you send it

Request this report files the brief. It appears on your dashboard and in the search's research history as In progress. We read it in full before the research starts and come back to you if anything needs sharpening — one note, not a questionnaire.

A first draft is back within a day. The finished study takes a little longer, because the checking is the part you are paying for, and you are emailed the moment it is live.