The method
ApproachEvery company runs the same sequence. What differs is how much work each stage takes, and whether the company survives the one in the middle. What each stage produces is below. How it is done is the practice.
Between the work and the market there is a decision, and it is ours to make rather than the founder’s. The investment case, the valuation, the structure, the documents, and the story each have to stand on their own in front of a serious investor. Not collectively, and not on average. Each.
A company that does not pass does not go out. It goes back. That is an unpopular thing to tell a founder who is running out of runway. It is also the single most valuable thing the practice does, because the alternative is spending the company’s one shot at a given investor on a file that was not ready.
An investor you approach too early is not a lead you can approach again later.
Nothing investor-facing is released until the case, the number, the structure and the story hold. The decision is recorded, with reasons.
Realistic, defensible, fundable. A valuation supported only by ambition is not a valuation, it is an ask. Where the founder’s number fails, we recommend a corrected one and then defend it in the room.
Most of this market stops at the document. We keep the two distinct in the work and own both through to closing, because a company does not need a plan for a raise, it needs the raise.
An SPV exists to clean a cap table or pool allocation. It is a tool, not a default, and where it is used we run it rather than recommend it and step back.
Company workspaces and data rooms are gated. Investor-facing material moves through an authorised, tracked path, and releases are logged.
We produce what this company needs to become fundable. A fixed deliverable list applied to every company is a product, and it is the reason so much of this material reads as though nobody had looked at the business.
The complete set an institutional investor expects, built in sequence, every document carrying the same numbers because they are generated from the same defended case.
The deck and the teaser are built last, not first. They compress a deal that has already been priced and structured, which is why their numbers can be trusted.
Why the deck comes last→