We read models, board packs and diligence files for a living. These are the patterns that keep repeating.
Published roughly twice a month, with no sales sequence attached
Every observation here comes from work we have actually done. Client details are removed; the arithmetic is not. Three are still in draft and are marked as such.
Top-down revenue is the single most common reason a model fails its first diligence call. Here is what investors do with it, and what to build instead.
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Saad Khalid Partner | 3 min read
Retainers run $3,000 to $12,000 a month across the market. What sits inside each band, and what you should not be paying for.
Large-firm work runs $20,000 to well past $100,000. Most of the spread is bookkeeping archaeology.
3 prices in this market buy genuinely different things. Only one of them survives a diligence call.
Two honest quotes can differ by a factor of five. The variable is almost never the arithmetic.
Most quotes are priced off revenue, which is convenient for the provider and wrong for you.
A Delaware C-Corp with no revenue still has obligations, and the penalties are fixed amounts rather than percentages.
When we rebuild a model bottom-up, the runway date moves. Almost always earlier, and almost always for the same 3 reasons.
Proof of cash, owner benefit, revenue cut-off. If you have not tested these on yourself, someone else will test them on you.
Lead with the number, then the reason. Most packs do the opposite and spend 11 pages arriving at the point.
Nothing published under that topic yet.
We are not neutral on all of these, and we say which way we lean and why.
Twice a month, one observation from a real file, with the arithmetic shown.
Used for the newsletter and nothing else. We do not share it and we do not sell it.
Drawn from a real model, board pack or diligence file, anonymized.
The numbers behind the claim, so you can test it against your own file.
Something specific to look at in your own model this week.
