Put the Facts in Order

A founder asked us: what should the material say first?

Let me put the view first. What you say first matters more than how well you say it. The line repeated most inside Glacier is this: the world has no fixed centre; the only centre is fact. It sounds like philosophy. On the workbench it is very concrete. Why? Three layers below.

Recover the facts first, then hear the claims

When a company comes to us, the first step is not writing material and not scheduling meetings. It is recovering the facts.

Like corporate archaeologists, we dig out layer by layer the patents, the product matrix, the customer orders, the quality of revenue, the team structure, the competitive landscape, the latent risks and the history of past financing. It is not a short list. But nine in ten of the questions investors hammer on later come out of it. The bottom layer of the Glacier pyramid is called the fact base — facts first, claims second. The fact base is the set of hole cards every judgment shares. The order cannot be reversed.

Why dig this fine? Because when something cannot be explained clearly, it is usually not a problem of expression. The facts have not been fully recovered. Whatever can be said can be said clearly — Wittgenstein wrote that in the Tractatus, and we treat it as the prequel to the Glacier philosophy. Some people find this a literary indulgence. On the workbench it is hard-edged: the parts you cannot explain are exactly the parts due diligence will check line by line. If you cannot fill it in, do not write it yet.

Scattered facts have no force

Second step: put the facts in order.

The same set of facts, arranged differently, carries completely different weight. A person's attention budget is spent at the opening. Our observation: in a roadshow, an hour of telling the company face to face, the other side really carries away two or three judgments (figures illustrative), under a tenth of the content. And those few almost always sat at the front. Change the order and the same material can be twice as persuasive.

Which is to say, order is a measure, and what it measures is which facts get a chance to be remembered. Put the most counterintuitive question at the front, build the tension first, then let the facts fill in, and the listener leans forward on his own. Start instead by explaining what the company does and then shake out the whole deck at once, and the fact that matters most lands where the listener is already tired. Not a word of the content has changed. The impact is gone.

This shows most on companies that have stayed underwater a long time. Years of solid work, never a systematic roadshow. The business ledger is full, the perception ledger is empty. It sounds like a burden. It is also an asset — no old labels to wash off. A first appearance can define the company by today's facts. As long as you do not assume the other side ought to know your past.

Let the market reach its own conclusion

We do not draw the market's conclusions for it. Lay the facts out in order, and let the market reach its own conclusion.

Is that too passive? The opposite. Whoever lays out the facts holds real power — order is the key, facts are the lock. We use that power in one place only: making every number and every chart survive being checked backwards. Evidence produced up front costs almost nothing. Change a statement once the cards are on the table and changing one page becomes changing a whole timetable. Only what survives checking lets you leave the conclusion to someone else.

Our attitude to automation comes from the same place. Plenty of steps can now be handed to tools, and many people do not dare hand them over. Why not? Because the input cannot be stated clearly. A tool does something unexpected because the input it received is not the input in your head. So the first step is always making the implicit basis explicit. Once it is explicit, it is safe in anyone's hands.

Analyse and decide from facts, not from doctrine. That has been Glacier's first principle since the day it was named. As for where a given company's facts should start, it depends on where it is most counterintuitive. That can only be worked out one company at a time.