Trust Is the Premise of Everything

Founders often ask us: at a first investor meeting, what should you talk about? Our answer is this — do not rush to talk about yourself.

Our position first. A deal structure can be designed. Trust cannot. Price, allocation, roles, order, terms, all of it can be negotiated around the table. Trust can only be accumulated one time at a time. So is there a shortcut? There is not.

Trust first is an ordering, not a figure of speech

Full-mandate collaboration has six dimensions: trust, information, narrative, tempo, relationships, accountability. Plainly put, the company keeps final authority and the rest of the process is coordinated by us. Trust comes first. That is not a matter of layout; it is a dependency. Who sees the information, who hears the narrative, who sets the tempo, all of it rests on whether the other side is willing to believe you. If trust caves in, the other five are empty. Build the foundation first.

Why is trust hard to accumulate? Because an adviser's fee structure invites suspicion by its nature. When we appear at the table, an investor's first reaction is often not "is this company worth it" but "is he looking after his own business." The suspicion is entirely reasonable. So how do you break it? Not by explaining. By doing a few things with no obvious direct benefit to yourself: handing industrial resources across, raising the holes in the business before anyone asks, cooperating on requests that do not pay for us. Patter cannot prove trust. Behaviour can.

Help nobody can see is not help

In one meeting we did not mention a single project of our own from start to finish. We simply took apart, with him, a company he cared about. Was that meeting worth it? Yes. Trust comes before the deal, and the deal is only trust being cashed. We are fairly sure of this one.

There is a trap running the other way. To save the founder time, you put your head down, finish the work and never sync the process. It looks considerate. But all the other side sees is silence. In other words, time saved where nobody can see it is not saved. So we turn invisible labour into visible evidence: regular review meetings, memos to institutions, every step of progress put on paper. If you did it, let it be seen.

Repeat business is the only report card that cannot be gamed

We take twenty to thirty mandates a year, half of them existing clients coming back for the next round, which means half of each year's business is re-voted by people we have already served. That ruler cannot be gamed. First, eight years doing one thing, with a standard that does not move with the market. Second, we write only what has already happened, never what has not. Third, every delivery is the principal of the next round of trust. Someone will say public relations can build a reputation too. That holds in other businesses. Here, the account recognises delivery and nothing else.

The last few notes have all been about the same thing. Repeat business is the evidence of trust, co-investing our own capital is the collateral of trust, restraint is the compound interest of trust. A structure that caves in can be renegotiated. Trust that caves in leaves nothing at all.

(For the six dimensions in full, see "Full-mandate collaboration" in the Archive.)