A data room and a five-year model in two weeks

The founders came with energy and a vivid idea: screens on ride-hailing vehicles, turning every journey into advertising space. What they didn't have was what investors ask for first: a verified cap table, clean contracts, proof of revenue.

They had a story. They didn't yet have a company an investor could examine.

At our first meeting I told them how I work. Tell a positive story, but be transparent about the risks. Investors forgive risk that's been named. They don't forgive risk that's been hidden.

Then I made it concrete: I would not let them meet an investor until the paperwork was ready.

We agreed a plan for the data room at that first meeting. Then I sent a questionnaire and a document request, and offered to draft whatever was missing: contracts for drivers, operating procedures, advisor agreements and security policies.

In parallel I built the five-year financial model, through 18 versions in around two weeks, each tightened by what the founders told me. It covered debt, working capital, deployment, a lender's view, and the scenarios that could go wrong.

A big idea is hard to fund. A hundred-screen block that stands on its own is easy to fund. So I reshaped the plan into 100-screen deployment tranches, each one independently financeable, so that an investor could say yes to a step, not a leap.

Then I wrote the pack: a funding memo with a mix of asset-backed debt and equity, a valuation approach, pitch decks, an operating blueprint, a go-to-market plan, a risk memo and a trademark search.

Within about two weeks of that first meeting, a company that had started with an idea and an empty folder had a complete pack, ready for investor conversations.