Exec Office

Privacy

This page is for two groups of people. If I have written to you, it explains where I got your details. If I have not, it explains why I may still hold information about you, taken from the public register of companies, and what I do with it. The short version: reply "stop" to any message and I will not write again, and you can ask me to delete what I hold at any time.

Who I am

Exec Office is run by me, Mark Flynn, a sole trader based in Guildford, Surrey. I am the data controller. You can reach me about anything on this page at [email protected].

People I research but never contact

This is the part most people reading this page fall into. To find the businesses I want to work with, I search the Companies House register and read what it publishes about company directors. Most of those companies are not a fit, and most of those directors never hear from me.

I currently hold register information about roughly 40,000 individuals in this way. I have not written to almost any of them, and I will not.

The law says that when I take your information from a source other than you, I should normally tell you within a month. Contacting forty thousand people to tell them I am not going to contact them would mean finding contact details I do not have, for people who never asked to hear from me. That is more intrusive than the research itself, so the law allows me to publish this information instead. That is what this page is.

What I hold

For directors I have screened: name, the month and year of birth, role, the date they were appointed, and the reference number Companies House gives them. All of it comes from the public register. I use the month and year of birth for two purposes. The first is to tell two people with the same name apart, which also makes my do-not-contact list reliable.

The second applies to one person per company, the director who also owns it: I work out their approximate age from the month and year the register publishes. It decides how I would open a first email, and nothing else. It does not decide whether your company is on my list, and nothing about it is passed on or published about you individually. I have written about the pattern in aggregate, that the owners of long-established firms with flat filings turn out to be in their mid-fifties, and that is the only use it has ever had.

I do not work out anyone else's age. Nor do I keep a director's nationality, which the register also publishes.

For people I contact: the above, plus a business email address and, where I have found one, a LinkedIn profile address. Also whether you replied, whether the message bounced, and whether you asked me to stop.

Being straight about what I have tightened: until late September 2026 my software kept a nationality and an approximate age for every director it read, not just the owner, because both come free with the register entry. Nothing ever used them. I have stopped collecting them and deleted the ones I held, which was around 53,000 nationalities and 12,000 ages. What survives is the single owner age described above, which has a purpose I have now stated.

I hold nothing sensitive about you, I do not buy lists, and I hold no information about your home or your personal finances.

Where I got it

What I use it for, and why I am allowed to

To decide which businesses to approach, to prepare the free market report I send, and to contact you about my work with owner-managed businesses.

I rely on legitimate interests: I have a genuine business reason to contact people who run companies like yours, it is a business-to-business approach at your work address, and you can stop it at any time. I have written down how I weighed that against your interests, and I will send you that assessment if you ask.

I use automated analysis of public company data to decide which companies to approach. It reads how long a director has been in post, whether head count has grown, and what the company's own website says. It decides only whether you hear from me, and a separate step uses the owner age above to choose how that first email opens. None of it makes a decision that affects you legally or in any similar way, and no human characteristic decides whether you are approached. You can object to this analysis, and to any marketing, and I will stop.

Who else handles it

These services process data on my behalf and only on my instructions:

Some of these are based outside the UK. Where they are, your data is protected either by UK adequacy regulations or by contract terms approved for international transfers.

I do not sell your data and I do not share it with anyone else.

How long I keep it

Director details for a company I do not pursue Deleted when that piece of research finishes
Someone I researched but never contacted Deleted within six months
Someone I contacted, who did not reply Deleted twelve months after I last contacted them
Someone I contacted, who replied Kept while we are talking, and for twelve months afterwards
Someone who asked me to stop Only what I need to recognise them, kept indefinitely, so that I never write again
A coarse record of what happened, after your own details are deleted Kept for three years. It holds your company's broad industry, size band and region, and what came of the contact. It is not anonymous: I could in principle work back from one to a company, so I treat it as personal data and everything on this page applies to it

Deleting your details also means removing them from the services listed above, including my own mailboxes. Backups expire on my providers' own schedules, within three months.

If you ask me to stop, I keep the minimum needed to recognise you: your name, your month and year of birth, your company, and the email address or profile I used. That is the only way I can be sure I never write to you again. If you would rather I held nothing at all, say so and I will delete everything, and accept that a future search might find you again.

Your rights

Email [email protected] and I will respond within a month. There is no charge.

If you are unhappy with how I have handled your data, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk. I would appreciate the chance to put it right first.

Last updated 29 September 2026.