Practice
What private advisory actually does
The work is less about answers than about which questions survive contact with a balance sheet.
Most descriptions of advisory work start from the deliverable and reason backwards. That gets the shape right and the substance wrong.
The first question is rarely the real one
A client arrives with a question that has already been narrowed. Someone has decided what kind of problem this is, and that decision usually happened before anyone senior was in the room.
The useful early work is widening it back out, which is uncomfortable, because widening a question looks like avoiding it.
Constraints are the interesting part
Anyone can list options. The difference is knowing which of them survive a real balance sheet, a real regulator and a real board that has already heard three versions of this pitch.
The recommendation is the easy half. The half that matters is knowing which constraints are actually load-bearing.
What ends up on the page
A good memo is shorter than the work behind it by a factor of about ten, and the ratio is the point rather than a failure of documentation.
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