Corporate finance is described as a numbers business. In practice it is a people business conducted through numbers. Deals begin, survive and complete because of relationships.

Compounding

Financial capital compounds, and so does relationship capital. Every piece of work done properly adds to a stock of trust that produces opportunities years later, often from directions you could not have predicted.

Origination

Most of my work does not arrive through pitches or processes. It arrives because someone I worked with years ago picked up the phone. That is not luck. It is the return on doing the last piece of work well and treating people properly while doing it.

The Long Book

I think of a career as a book of relationships rather than a list of transactions. Deals close and fade. Relationships carry forward. Protecting them, sometimes at the cost of a fee, has been the best investment I have made.