One Method.
Three moments when it decides everything.
Get any of these wrong, and it costs tens of millions.
Built for the people who move serious money — PE funds, LPs, family offices, banks, insurers, and the boards that answer for it.
We can work from a distance —
or come in person.
The difference is how deep we can get to the truth.
Pre-Deal Assessment
Before you invest
Due diligence takes months.
The real question — can you trust this person —
you have days to answer.
You decide faster than you can ever check the people.
Normal due diligence checks the numbers, the contracts, the structure. It never answers the one question that matters: can you trust the person who will run your money for the next 7 to 10 years — and does he even see the real state of his own business?
“The numbers get weeks of checking. The person behind them gets a quick reference call and a good first impression. That is usually where the loss starts.”
Decision Monitoring
While you own it · ongoing retainer
Most investors find out the fund is in trouble
when the GP calls to talk about a continuation vehicle.
By then, it is already too late.
You check the person once, before you invest. Then your money is locked in for years — and no one keeps watching him. That is when funds actually fall apart: not on the day you go in, but later. The key person leaves. Someone else starts calling the shots. Bad news takes longer to reach you. And none of it shows up in the numbers until the money is already gone.
Decision Monitoring keeps that read going. We keep watching the people and what is happening around them. The moment something shifts — enough to turn a GO into a HOLD, or a HOLD into a NO-GO — you hear it from us right away, not at the next quarterly meeting.
Three Levels
How closely we watch depends on how much money is on the line — and how many people control the outcome.
Decision Point
Stay or walk · follow-on · continuation vehicle · exit
The hardest call is not whether the numbers add up.
It is whether the person asking for more time, more money, or more trust still sees things clearly.
A continuation vehicle. A follow-on round. An exit that depends on a handover. Every one of them comes down to the same question: stay in, stay in on new terms, or pull your money out. The trap here is a good past record. It can look spotless while the way decisions get made has already fallen apart — and the next time they ask for money can be the point of no return.
“A clean track record tells you where the money has been.
It tells you nothing about whether the person asking for more can still see what’s coming.”
What it costs depends on the size of the deal, how deep we go, and how we work.
Discussed one-on-one, under NDA.
Missing a single warning sign costs more than ten years of this ever would.
Which of the three moments
are you in now?
Each of these moments has a window — and it doesn’t stay open.