Industries
Financial services, and nothing else.
A page like this usually carries ten industries and a sentence about each. Ten would be a list of nine places we would be learning at your expense.
Most of our work is on the investment side of the industry, where one label covers a dozen desks that have little in common. What they share is the paper: documents arriving faster than anyone can read them, and a judgment at the end that has to carry a person’s name.
By strategy
What the week is actually made of.
Private equity, venture, credit, hedge funds, real assets, secondaries, and the allocators who invest in all of them. Each row is what arrives on that desk and where the work begins once it does. This is how we describe a firm’s problem back to them on a first call.
Buyout and growth equity
CIMQuality of earningsManagement presentation
A deal team reads far more books than it can act on, and nearly all of that reading is a search for the few findings that would end the process.
Venture capital
Pitch deckData roomFounder update
Portfolio reporting arrives in as many formats as there are founders. Extracting the same handful of fields from each one is work no associate should be doing by hand.
Private credit and direct lending
Credit agreementCompliance certificateBorrower reporting
Covenant verification against the document that defines the covenant. The definitions are negotiated deal by deal, and the check recurs every quarter for the life of the loan.
Hedge funds
DDQRisk reportingPrime broker files
The diligence questionnaire answered from a blank page each time one arrives, when most of its questions were answered last quarter in a document somebody could locate.
Real estate
LeaseRent rollAppraisal
Lease abstraction. Reading every lease in a portfolio for the same twelve fields is the most consequential routine reading in the industry.
Infrastructure and real assets
Concession agreementO&M contractOperator reporting
Agreements written for twenty-five-year terms, and quarterly operator reporting that has to be tied back to what those agreements actually require.
Secondaries
GP valuation packNAV statementLPA
Pricing a portfolio means reading another manager’s marks across every position in it, inside the window before the bid is due.
Funds of funds, LPs and allocators
Capital account statementQuarterly letterSide letter
Statements from every manager in a different format, and a file of side letters recording what each of them owes you.
Fund administration and the back office
NAV packGeneral ledger and subledgerK-1
Breaks, and tracing a break back to the entry that caused it. The tie-out is the deliverable; the reading is what it costs to get there.
A desk that is not listed is not a refusal. It means we have not written the row yet, and we would rather ask what crosses your desk than guess at it here.
The four patterns
Four shapes of work, common to all of them.
Remove the strategy label and the same four jobs are underneath, which is why an engagement begins by observing one process rather than by selecting a tool.
Reading to a decision
Two hundred pages exist, four things in them matter, and someone has to find them before Thursday. This is where most of the hours are and the least of the judgment.
Assembly
Memos, letters, and questionnaires built out of work the firm has already done. The first draft is a retrieval problem that presents as a writing problem.
Reconciliation
Two records that should agree do not, and someone has to establish why. A model is good at producing the candidate explanations and poor at deciding which one is correct.
Undocumented knowledge
The answer exists in someone’s memory or in a message from 2023, and locating it costs more than deriving it would have.
Limits
What we will tell you it cannot do.
On a regulated desk these belong at the front of the conversation rather than in a schedule at the back of the contract.
It does not select investments.
And we will not build toward it. Everything lands in front of the person whose name goes on the memo, with the source open beside it, and that person still decides. Any firm suggesting otherwise is selling something it cannot deliver.
It does not mark positions.
A valuation is a signed judgment and a model has no signature. It can assemble the pack, tie figures back to source, and flag what moved since last quarter for a person to review.
It is not pointed at a data room until compliance says so.
That is a question for your CTO, your compliance officer, and in some cases your LPs before it is a question for us. Where data goes is scoped in the first week, and the answer has ended engagements before they began.
Tell us what crosses your desk.
The document that arrives too often, who reads it, and what they are looking for when they do. That is enough for us to say whether there is a workshop here or an engagement, and whether we are the right firm for it.