The Spaceship That Does Not Come Back

People keep asking us: why does Glacier take so few mandates?

Our view first. It is not standing on ceremony, it is arithmetic. As we see it, a startup is a spaceship bound for space that does not come back. There is no draft version of building a company. The day the first agreement is signed the countdown starts — the organisation, the shareholder structure, the capital path all get loaded aboard, item by item, over the voyage. Once loaded, they cannot be taken out.

Before launch and after launch are two different prices

Before launch, correcting a mistake costs roughly nothing. After launch? The window in which you can intervene narrows fast. Fuel, seals, supplies, who is aboard with you, acceleration — whatever goes wrong does not show up that day, it shows up at the furthest point of the voyage, where it is hardest to repair. So almost all of the effort goes in before launch. There are no exceptions to this one.

So where does the effort come from? From the partners' attention. Look at the arithmetic. Three partners, twenty or thirty mandates a year, half new and half existing clients coming back for the next round, that is, repeat mandates; each mandate runs sixty days across eight milestones, from building the fact base to closing the funds, and at every milestone someone has to be sitting at the table. Judgement, research and coordination are all non-renewable. Spread across a hundred projects, it is a broken promise to all hundred. So we keep subtracting: quality up, concurrency down. Few and selective, partner-led, deeply on site, no templated operation, front-line feedback synchronised in real time. It is specific people who take on a project.

Our people can grow in number, our projects cannot

Some advise taking on more, since some of them will work out. That logic holds in other businesses. It does not hold here. Why? Because what we sell is not a slot, it is presence. People can grow in number, and new people bring new capacity; the number of projects cannot — that would dilute promises already made. Limited capacity means refusing to dilute.

And colleagues with no mandate in hand at the moment? That is ammunition, not cost. An empty slot in the diary is there so that when the best mandate appears we can say yes immediately. Anxiety about capacity should point at the quality of the pipeline, not at the roster. Which is to say, we would rather sit empty.

Take the person first, the category second

How willing the founder is to work with us comes before every other condition. A team you cannot move will not finish the course however many supplies it carries. The hardest counterparty is never the one on the opposite side of an argument; it is the one with no experience who will not be moved — he cannot tell what is standard, what is a concession and what should never be on the table at all. If the other side has done something similar before, then even head to head, the process and the expectations align quickly. On this one we are fairly confident.

Every week we also confirm again what should stop: which firms are paused, which meetings will not be scheduled again, which decks will not be revised again. Without stopping there is no focus.

We take few because every one has to be held.

(On why service capacity is limited, see the entry of that name in the Archive.)