Attribution and Access

The strategy is not the question

By the second meeting an institutional allocator has seen the strategy before. Lower middle market, operationally involved, sector-focused, entering below the multiples where auctions clear — the description is shared by a large number of managers raising at the same time, and it is not a differentiator to any of them.

The allocator is running a different enquiry underneath the meeting: whether this person's past returns are attributable to this person, and whether the deals they describe doing next can be got by anyone else.

Attribution

A track record built inside a prior firm belongs partly to that firm. The allocator wants to know which deals the manager sourced, which they led, at what point in the process they entered, who else was in the room, and what the outcome would have been without them.

The strongest form of this is a reference from someone with no stake in the answer: a former colleague who did not come along, a management team from a company already exited, a co-investor who declined a deal the manager did. Managers routinely supply references who are invested in the next fund and are surprised that the reference carries so little weight.

Attribution that cannot be established independently is treated as absent. This is why a manager with strong numbers can raise nothing, and it is almost always a documentation problem rather than a performance one.

Access

The second question is whether the manager's pipeline is reachable by the allocator's existing managers. A fund that buys in intermediated processes is offering exposure the allocator already has, with an additional fee layer and a shorter history.

Demonstrating the alternative requires specifics: named channels, relationships that predate the fund, deals seen before they were marketed, and a pipeline the manager can describe with dates. Assertions about a network do not survive the second meeting, because every manager makes them.

This is also the part of the underwriting that first closes cannot fake. An anchor drawn from people who know the manager personally is a reference on the person. It says nothing about the pipeline, which is why the second close is where the real underwriting starts.

Sequence

The order in which allocators are approached determines the outcome more than the materials do. A manager who opens with the largest and most process-driven institutions collects a set of declines that then have to be explained to everyone approached afterwards.

The work sits in establishing attribution and access before the first meeting, and in the order of the meetings after it.