Why this exists
Across Japan there are profitable, well-run small companies whose owner is approaching retirement with nobody lined up to take over. The businesses are not failing. Their owners simply have no low-risk way to find someone to hand them to, and the fear of staff, customers and suppliers hearing about it first stops many of them from ever starting to look.
Both of the routes an owner already had are real services that work. Neither is built for the question they ask first.
The right answer for a large or complicated deal, and the people doing it are experienced and trusted. But the cost and the pace are built for those deals. For a family business whose owner has only begun to wonder what happens next, it is a heavier commitment than the question they are actually asking.
Self-serve, so you can start at eleven at night without speaking to anyone. Anonymous by default rather than on request — the public version of a listing does not contain your identifying details at all, so there is nothing there to leak. And real people behind it — not a form and a queue.
Your company name, its location and often its numbers go in front of the whole internet on day one. For an owner whose main worry is the people around them finding out before anything is real, that is not a side effect of the service. It is the thing they were trying to avoid.
Keisho Scout is a joint venture between Acquire Scout and Keisho. That is not a footnote about corporate structure — it is the reason the product can be self-serve without being unattended.
The people who answer
A Japan M&A advisory. Keisho is the human side of this product. They are the reason “someone will be in touch if you get stuck” is a commitment rather than an intention, and where a deal goes when it outgrows self-serve.
Someone at Keisho reads every listing before it appears. Not a sample, and not only the ones that look risky.
The platform and the buyers
Builds and runs the platform, and brings buyers from outside Japan, the demand a seller cannot reach through a domestic listing site. Acquire Scout is a separate product with its own customers; what it contributes here is the engineering and the international reach.
Small and mid-sized Japanese businesses: family firms, second and third-generation companies, sole proprietors. Often owners who are open to selling but have never spoken to an adviser, and would rather look into it quietly before telling anyone.
Domestic searchers, entrepreneurs and strategic acquirers, and buyers from outside Japan, for whom the barrier has never been a shortage of businesses but the language and the unfamiliarity of how any of it works.
The last honest word
Four of these, and one thing we are. They are at the end because you now know enough for them to mean something.
Not a full-service advisory ourselves. Large or complicated deals belong with Keisho directly. This is the self-serve front door, with a clear handoff when a deal needs one.
Not a business directory. A listing reveals nothing to a buyer the seller has not approved, and nothing at all to someone who is not signed in.
Not a broker standing between you and the buyer. Since September we do not. The owner decides who gets through, and an approved buyer reaches the business directly. If you would rather we stayed in the middle, that is a plan — say so and we will be.
Not an English site with Japanese added afterwards, and not the reverse. Both languages are written properly and separately, because a half-translated page is its own kind of warning sign.
A quiet way to take the first step. Anonymous by default, free to list, free to browse, and free all the way through a sale you run yourself.
