Every seat is paid on the claim coming back

The primary channel

Lenders

When a software credit turns, you already have the seats covered that can be covered. The financial advisor builds the 13-week cash flow. The banker tells you the market’s mood. A CRO, if it comes to that, runs the company. But a 13-week cash flow tells you how long the company can wait; it does not tell you what it will recover. Nobody at the table tells you what a buyer’s diligence will find, what each defect costs in enterprise value, and which recovery the credit can actually support. Most lenders never get that question answered until a process fails. That is the seat we fill. The seat is the same in a bank’s special assets group; what differs is the approval chain, which is why the way in is staged: each step is a bounded decision, priced on its own, cleared before the next is asked for.

Best recovery is yours to define: speed with flexibility on the mark, maximum value with the patience to earn it, or the honest answer of which one the credit supports. Every engagement starts with your objective and reports against it. And the economics follow the work: the reads and the underwriting are fixed, the same fee whatever they conclude and whether or not you have asked us to bid; the operating and preparation work is paid for the time it takes, with the larger part of what we can earn tied to the recovery you set.

The way in is staged, and each stage earns the next. The portfolio watch runs on the reporting you already hold: quarterly, across the book, no borrower contact, no name designated, nothing signaled. The first read takes one name for two to three weeks and says whether a full underwriting is worth buying. Exit underwriting follows only where the evidence says it should, prepared under the seat you elected: on an operating-partner name we do not bid and the analysis in your file comes from a firm with no bid on the table; on a bidder name the analysis and our bid at the supported price arrive together, at a fee that changes with neither.

Two things we hold to throughout. We work with the sponsor, not around them: a prepared sale clears above the as-is case for their equity as well as your claim. And information walls are agreed in writing before we see anything. The credit-side habits of the partners who built this screen from your side of the table, at direct-lending and credit funds, are the habits it runs on.

The vintage question

Sponsors

A company gets one credible sale process, and you get one exit from it. The 2021 vintage poses the question directly: crystallize now, or drift. Drift feels safe because its costs arrive quarterly and in small denominations: another amendment, another extension, another year of a fund’s life. Discipline, not drift, is the alternative: a dated, underwritten path to a sale that closes, with the defects priced and fixed before buyers find them. The broken-process discount punishes an unprepared process worse than any market timing does.

The best moment to start is earlier than the moment everyone starts: eighteen to twenty-four months before maturity, while the runway is yours to manage and the equity still has something to defend. And the version of this story you want in the next data room is the managed one: a professionalised exit, underwritten and closed, rather than a fourth amendment. One exit. Make it count.

The ones aboard

Management teams

Before it is anyone’s exit, it is your company, and the underwriting reads it the way you already run it: the numbers as they are, the product as it is, the customer base as it renews. What it gives you is the buyer’s view of your own metrics: which improvements a buyer actually pays for, which defects cost enterprise value, and what can be fixed before anyone has to decide anything. If and when it comes to a sale, you walk in prepared; what the work spares you is the alternative: a process that fails in public, with your name on it.

In a business whose value is confidence, the people who hold the customer relationships and the code are the asset. So we replace only where necessary; where change is needed, the underwriting says so plainly, to you first. Where the cap table allows, we push for management’s own transaction economics to be tied to the same outcome ours is, so the incentives point the same way.

The referrers

Counsel, accountants and bankers

A recovery that lands is the outcome every one of your clients is paid on, and the referral that gets there is usually made months before a banker is mandated or a forbearance is signed. For restructuring counsel: milestone language that makes readiness a condition rather than a hope, available on request for your own redline. For accountants: underwriting built to hold up beside the QoE, not to contradict it. For bankers: every software banker has one or two names in the pipeline that need two more quarters than the seller wants to give them. Prepared first, that name becomes a mandate that closes, with the fee intact and the process worth referencing.

And the fence that makes referral safe: we are not a banker, and we do not become one. We do not run sale processes, contact buyers, negotiate transaction terms or handle proceeds. The mandate stays where it belongs; it just walks into a process the underwriting has already made ready.