Our values
Four principles govern how this firm works. They are set out here because a client is entitled to know the standards to which we can be held, and because we would rather be measured against them than described in general terms.
Client focus
We are engaged by one party, paid by one party, and answerable to one party.
The interests of a client are not weighed against other interests inside this firm, because there are no other interests inside this firm. We hold no capital in the businesses we advise. We operate no lending, trading or investment book. We act for no buyer on any asset we are mandated to sell. A client is entitled to advice that would be identical whether or not a transaction completes, and that is possible only in a firm structured so that nobody within it benefits from the wrong outcome.
Client focus is also a set of habits, and the habits matter as much as the structure. Every enquiry receives a response within two business days. Every client receives a written update in every week a mandate is live, whether or not there is news to report. No document reaches a client without having been read by someone other than the person who wrote it. These are not courtesies. They are the minimum conditions under which an owner can make the largest financial decision of a working life with confidence, and we regard a failure to meet them as a failure of the engagement.
Cooperation
No individual owns a client relationship at this firm. The firm does.
Every mandate is staffed by a team, reviewed by a committee, and documented so that any member of that team can carry it forward without loss of continuity. This is deliberate, and it is a direct response to how transactions fail in this market. Too many depend on one person's relationships and stall when that person's attention moves to something else. A client who engages this firm is engaging an institution, and is entitled to the same standard of work in the eleventh month of a mandate as in the first week.
Cooperation extends beyond our own walls. A sale process involves the client's counsel, auditors, tax advisers and, frequently, lenders. We do not compete with them for the client's confidence, we do not withhold information from them to preserve our position, and we do not present their advice as ours. The transaction is the client's. We are one of the parties working on it.
Integrity
We will forgo a fee before we will forgo a reputation.
The Nigerian mid-market is not large. We expect to meet the same buyers, the same lenders, the same counsel and the same regulators for the next thirty years, and every one of them keeps a memory. A firm that overstates a business once has ended its usefulness to every client that comes after. This is not principally an ethical position. It is the only commercially rational way to build an advisory practice intended to last.
In practice this means: we do not present figures we have not tested against source records; we do not describe a business in terms its own management would not recognise; we do not conceal from a buyer a defect we know to exist; we disclose conflicts before they are discovered; and we decline any mandate where the source of a counterparty's funds cannot be established to our satisfaction. Where these commitments cost us a transaction, we accept the cost.
Perfection
Perfection is a standard of preparation. It is not a claim about outcomes.
We cannot promise a price, a buyer, or a closing date, and a firm that does so should be treated with suspicion. What is entirely within our control is that no document leaves this firm carrying an error. A misstated working capital adjustment, two pages of the same memorandum that do not reconcile, an organogram showing a person who left last year — each of these tells a buyer something about how the underlying business is run, and each is ultimately paid for out of the seller's proceeds.
Every figure we publish is traced to source. Every document is reviewed by a person who did not draft it. Every draft is read once more before it is sent. The discipline is unglamorous and it is the reason a process holds together in the fourth month, when a buyer's diligence team is looking for a reason to reprice.