Terms of Service
Effective Date: August 1, 2026 · Not in force until reviewed by counsel and published
These Terms of Service ("Terms") govern your use of the Five Experts platform and services. By creating an account, purchasing a service, or using Five Experts, you agree to these Terms.
1. About Five Experts
Five Experts helps acquisition entrepreneurs find, evaluate, and pursue privately held businesses and access experts and operators who can support them throughout the acquisition and ownership journey.
Depending on the service you choose, Five Experts may provide membership tools, market research, company verification, target lists, owner outreach, acquisition-search support, expert introductions, candidate introductions, community access, and related services.
Five Experts works for buyers. We do not represent sellers, list businesses for sale, negotiate transaction terms for buyers or sellers, provide transaction valuations, handle transaction funds, or receive compensation based on the purchase price or successful closing of an acquisition.
Five Experts is not a business broker, M&A advisor, broker-dealer, law firm, accounting firm, tax advisor, investment adviser, or other licensed professional advisor. Our services and information are not legal, tax, accounting, investment, valuation, or financial advice.
You are responsible for evaluating any company, acquisition, Candidate, Expert, financing source, or other opportunity and for engaging appropriate professional advisors.
2. Membership, Payment and Cancellation
Five Experts offers membership plans and other paid services. The price, billing frequency, features, and services included in your purchase will be shown at checkout or stated in your proposal, order form, or statement of work.
Memberships may be monthly or annual and automatically renew for the same billing period unless cancelled before the renewal date.
Payments and recurring subscription renewals are processed through Stripe. You may manage or cancel your subscription through the subscription-management process provided to you.
Cancellation stops future renewals and takes effect at the end of your current paid billing period. Unless required by law or stated otherwise in a specific offer, amounts already paid are non-refundable and are not prorated.
Five Experts may change future membership pricing or features by providing appropriate notice. Changes will not alter fees already agreed to for an active separately scoped engagement unless we both agree to the change in writing.
3. Research and Search Services
Five Experts uses public information, commercial datasets, research tools, technology, proprietary processes, and human review.
Information such as revenue, EBITDA, employee count, ownership, contact information, and industry classification may be estimated, incomplete, outdated, or incorrect. When Five Experts describes a company as "Verified," it means our team reviewed the company against reasonably available information at that time. It does not mean that we guarantee the information or the company.
Five Experts may provide market research, build a target universe, identify companies, research owners and contacts, conduct owner outreach, support search pipelines, and provide related acquisition-search services.
The scope, price, timing, and deliverables for a customized engagement will be stated in the applicable proposal, order form, or statement of work.
Five Experts does not guarantee that an identified company is available for sale, meets all of your acquisition criteria, will respond to outreach, or will result in a transaction.
For Managed Search, Five Experts works solely for the buyer. We do not represent the business owner or seller, negotiate transaction terms, value the business, prepare transaction documents, handle transaction funds, or charge a success fee or percentage of the acquisition value.
Unless your proposal states otherwise, either party may terminate a Managed Search engagement with 30 days' written notice. Fees remain payable through the effective termination date.
Market Research Membership Credit
If your purchase includes an offer allowing a Market Research fee to be credited toward Membership, the terms of that credit will be stated at purchase.
Unless otherwise stated, if you purchase a paid Five Experts Membership within 30 days after purchasing eligible Market Research, the Market Research fee will be credited toward your Membership invoices. The credit has no cash value and is not refundable.
4. Introductions, Candidates and Experts
Candidate Introductions
A "Candidate" is a person first introduced to you by Five Experts for a potential employment, executive, fractional, consulting, advisory, interim, or compensated board role.
If a Candidate introduced by Five Experts enters into a compensated engagement with you or an affiliated company within 24 months of our introduction, you will pay Five Experts a placement fee equal to 10% of the Candidate's first-year cash compensation, up to a maximum fee of $25,000, unless different terms were agreed to in writing before the introduction.
The fee is due within 30 days after the Candidate begins the engagement.
No placement fee applies if you can reasonably document that you already had a substantive relationship with the Candidate or were already discussing substantially the same engagement before Five Experts made the introduction.
Five Experts Bench
Five Experts maintains a private bench of independent Experts.
Experts provide their services directly to Members. Five Experts facilitates matching, booking, and billing but does not supervise or control the Expert's professional services.
Engagements resulting from a Five Experts introduction must be booked and billed through Five Experts. The Member pays the Expert's listed rate, and Five Experts retains a 10% platform share from the amount billed.
Experts set their own rates and remain responsible for the services they provide.
Five Experts does not claim fees on an Expert's pre-existing clients, relationships, or independent network.
5. Confidentiality and Ownership
Your Information
Your non-public acquisition thesis, buy box, pipeline, transaction information, and other confidential information you provide to Five Experts will be treated as confidential.
We may share that information with employees, contractors, technology providers, data providers, and other service providers when reasonably necessary to provide the services or when required by law.
We may use aggregated or anonymized information and learnings that do not identify you or disclose a specific confidential acquisition target or transaction.
Five Experts Materials
Five Experts owns its platform, software, processes, methodologies, workflows, research formats, verification processes, templates, educational materials, and other proprietary materials.
Reports and deliverables prepared specifically for you may be used by you for your own acquisition activities unless your agreement states otherwise.
You may share Five Experts research with attorneys, accountants, lenders, investors, consultants, and other advisors involved in your acquisition effort.
You may not publish, resell, license, commercially distribute, scrape, systematically extract, or use Five Experts research, data, or materials to build or materially improve a competing product or service.
6. Company Reservations and Fair Use
Five Experts may work with multiple buyers whose acquisition criteria overlap.
To reduce competing outreach generated through Five Experts, we may reserve an actively pursued company or owner to a particular Member. Five Experts will not knowingly conduct managed outreach to the same owner for multiple Members at the same time.
Reservations are based on activity and are not permanent. An inactive company or opportunity may become available to another Member.
A reservation does not give a Member ownership or exclusive rights to a company, owner, lead, contact, or opportunity. Five Experts cannot prevent an owner from communicating independently with another buyer, broker, investor, or other party.
Members may not scrape the platform, use automated tools to collect information, share account credentials, resell Five Experts data, interfere with the platform, or use Five Experts services for unlawful purposes.
We may suspend or terminate access if we reasonably believe these rules have been violated.
7. No Guaranteed Outcomes and Limitation of Liability
Buying a business involves risk, and many factors are outside Five Experts' control.
Five Experts does not guarantee the number of companies that will meet your criteria, owner responses, meetings, financing, letters of intent, completion of an acquisition, Candidate performance or retention, business performance, investment returns, or any other particular result.
Past results, examples, case studies, and testimonials do not guarantee future results.
To the fullest extent permitted by law, Five Experts will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, punitive, exemplary, or consequential damages, including lost profits, lost opportunities, or lost business arising from the services.
To the fullest extent permitted by law, Five Experts' total liability arising from the services will not exceed the amount you paid Five Experts during the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim.
8. Accounts and Ending the Relationship
You may close your Five Experts account or cancel your Membership at any time, subject to the billing and cancellation terms above.
Five Experts may suspend or terminate access for material breach, non-payment, unlawful conduct, misuse of data, unauthorized platform use, or violation of these Terms.
Where reasonably practical, we will provide notice and an opportunity to correct a breach before terminating access.
Ending your account does not eliminate payment obligations already incurred.
When an account is closed, Five Experts may retain information required for legal, tax, transaction, security, or compliance purposes.
Terms relating to confidentiality, intellectual property, payment obligations, limitations of liability, and introduction or placement fees that by their nature should continue after termination will remain in effect.
9. Community
Membership may include access to a Five Experts community hosted by Five Experts or a third-party platform.
Participation is optional. Information you post in a community space may be visible to other participants, so you should not post confidential acquisition targets, transaction details, or other information you do not want other participants to see.
Five Experts may moderate community content and may remove content or suspend access for unlawful, harassing, deceptive, abusive, or inappropriate commercial conduct.
Information shared by Members, Experts, or other participants represents their own views and is not professional advice from Five Experts.
10. Privacy
Five Experts collects and uses personal information in connection with its services. Our separate Privacy Policy explains how personal information is collected, used, shared, retained, and protected and describes applicable privacy rights.
11. California Law; Arbitration
These Terms and any dispute arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Five Experts services will be governed by the laws of the State of California.
Except for claims eligible for small claims court or requests for temporary or injunctive relief, any dispute arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Five Experts services will be resolved by binding arbitration before a single neutral arbitrator administered by the American Arbitration Association ("AAA") under its applicable rules then in effect.
The arbitration will take place in California unless the parties agree otherwise or applicable law requires otherwise. The arbitrator may award any relief available under applicable law.
Each party will bear its own attorneys' fees and costs except where applicable law or the arbitrator's authority provides otherwise.
Arbitration will be conducted on an individual basis and not as a class, consolidated, or representative action, to the extent permitted by applicable law.
Nothing in this section prevents either party from bringing an eligible claim in small claims court or seeking temporary or injunctive relief from a court of competent jurisdiction.
12. Changes to These Terms
Five Experts may update these Terms from time to time. Changes apply prospectively, and we will provide notice of material changes when required by law.
An active Managed Search or other separately scoped engagement will remain subject to the commercial terms agreed to when the engagement began unless both parties agree otherwise in writing.
If a proposal, order form, or statement of work expressly conflicts with these Terms, the engagement-specific document controls for that engagement.
Operator to Owner
The Operator to Owner program will be governed by separate program terms rather than these general Terms of Service.
Those terms will address the operator placement, compensation arrangement, potential purchase structure, relationship among Five Experts, the operator, and the business owner, and Five Experts' applicable placement fee.
Five Experts does not guarantee that an Operator to Owner placement will result in an eventual acquisition. Any employment or operating arrangement, purchase option, purchase price, financing arrangement, or eventual acquisition agreement is between the operator and the applicable business.
The Operator to Owner terms should be finalized with counsel before publication.
Questions? Contact us at Growth@FiveExperts.com