Insights
Notes on capital markets, corporate strategy, communications, and the forces that shape enterprise value and reputation.
Why most capital raises fail before the pitch
By the time a company is in the room with investors, the outcome is usually already decided. The pitch gets the credit or the blame, but the real work happened weeks earlier: who got targeted, what materials they received first, whether the story matched what the numbers could actually support. Companies that treat fundraising as a single event, build the deck, book the meetings, hope for the best, are working against companies that treated it as a campaign: sequenced outreach, a narrative tested on friendly investors first, and terms discussed before they're negotiated under pressure. The difference isn't access to better investors. It's whether the groundwork got done before anyone asked for money.
The communications function most companies build too late
Most companies build investor relations and corporate communications reactively, after the first earnings miss, after the first activist letter, after the first reporter calls asking questions nobody prepared for. By then, the function is playing defense instead of setting the narrative. The companies that handle scrutiny well built the infrastructure, disclosure discipline, a consistent narrative, real relationships with the people who cover them, before they needed it. Communications isn't the department that responds when something happens. Done right, it's the reason fewer things go wrong in the first place.
What a governance review actually catches
Governance reviews get treated as a compliance exercise, a checklist to clear before a raise or a listing. The companies that get real value from one are looking for something different: where does authority actually sit versus where the org chart says it sits, and what happens when those two answers disagree under pressure. Board composition matters less than whether the board can actually challenge management when it needs to. That's not a legal question. It's a design question, and it's usually invisible until the moment it matters most.
The first 100 days after a deal closes are already decided
Integration planning is treated as the work that starts after signature, when in practice, the decisions that determine whether an acquisition works get made during diligence, whether anyone's paying attention or not. Which systems talk to which, who actually owns which customer relationships, where the two cultures are going to collide first. Companies that build the integration plan alongside the deal terms, not after them, are the ones where the first 100 days look like execution instead of improvisation.
Why private market valuations are becoming a credibility problem
Since 2022, public market multiples have compressed by double digits across most sectors, while many private funds continue reporting valuations near their 2021 peaks. That gap used to be explained away by illiquidity. It increasingly reads as something else: a test of whether a fund's marks reflect market reality or internal preference. Institutional allocators have responded by adding independent valuation reviews and stress-tested scenarios to their diligence, and regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are paying closer attention to how those marks get made. The funds that hold up under that scrutiny are the ones that can explain a deviation from public comparables, not just assert one.
The retreat from earnings guidance isn't about saying less
Fewer than 60 percent of S&P 500 companies issued earnings guidance in 2020, down from over 70 percent before the pandemic, and a large share never went back. That's usually read as companies going quiet. The more accurate read is that guidance stopped functioning as a stabilizer and started functioning as a magnifier, a one-cent miss could erase billions in value regardless of what it actually meant about the business. What's replaced it isn't silence. It's a harder job: building investor confidence around trajectory and capital discipline instead of a quarterly number. That's a communications problem before it's a numbers problem.
Private credit's covenant erosion is a workout problem waiting to happen
Over 75 percent of U.S. middle market unitranche deals were covenant-lite by 2023, up from roughly 35 percent five years earlier, while deal sizes and leverage multiples climbed at the same time. The original pitch for private credit rested on control in a downside scenario, senior secured status, a direct relationship with the borrower. That control gets diluted as deals get larger, more layered with co-investors, and structurally closer to syndicated loans without the same liquidity or oversight. The risk doesn't show up in a rising market. It shows up specifically in workout scenarios, exactly the situations where the original thesis was supposed to matter most.
More on the way. Get in touch if you'd like to talk through any of this directly.
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