Someone whose only job is to know whether the operating capability behind your next fund can actually carry it. A standing seat, sized to the need.
You are launching an evergreen vehicle. You asked your administrator whether they can support it. They said yes.
Of course they said yes. The question is whether you have any way to know.
Yes has to mean a NAV every month that investors transact on, not a quarterly mark. Subscription and redemption cycles at a cadence your closed-end funds never required. Investor counts an order of magnitude higher, behind advisors and platforms with service expectations of their own. A close that is a commercial deadline rather than a reporting convention. And an accuracy standard that stacked human review does not reach at speed.
If the answer turns out to be no, you find out after the vehicle is live, in front of the platform that distributed it. At that point the operating model is not a back-office question. It decides which products you can credibly launch, which means it decides where your next growth comes from.
Some of it is a real product. Some of it is a wrapper on a model you could license yourself. Some of it will be a free feature within a year. Nobody at your firm can reliably tell which, and the claims arrive in a sales deck rather than in a service agreement.
There is also a question that rarely gets asked out loud. If the productivity is real, does any of it reach your fee, or does it stay with them.
Which capabilities to demand and which to build, what your own team should use and what it should stop paying anyone else to do, how work gets validated when a machine produced it, what it means for who you hire, and how you train the people you have.
Your CFO does not have time for these, your provider is not neutral about them, and at a firm your size nobody has answering them in their job description.
What the vehicles you intend to launch require, and whether your provider or your own team can carry it.
Which of your provider's AI is a product and which is a wrapper, and what they will put in a service agreement rather than a slide.
Whether provider productivity reaches your pricing or stays with them, and what to ask for at renewal.
What belongs with a provider, what belongs with your team, and what you should stop paying anyone to do.
What gets checked and who signs before a number reaches an investor, whoever produced it.
What changed, what it means for you, and the two or three things worth doing.
More than a monthly check in, less than a hire. Enough presence to be in the room when decisions are made rather than told about them afterward. Monthly rather than hourly.
The first ninety days map the capability gap against what you intend to launch.
It runs without me. If a quarter passes with nothing owned or decided, hold me to it.
I sell no software, take nothing from vendors, have no bench to staff, and no administrator of my own to defend.
I led the largest hedge fund and private equity relationships at a global administrator. I know what they can deliver, what they will agree to under pressure, and where their margin is.
Most of the business at a fund administrator, and a P&L as a general manager before that.
Including the one I run my own week on, and I brought machine reading of documents into fund operations before it was fashionable.
Knowing it from the inside is the only reason I am useful in it.
The answers keep moving, which is why this cannot be delivered as a study. It wants someone whose only job is to track it, who sees how a dozen firms are approaching the same problem rather than one, and who has no reason to prefer any provider or any tool. Elsewhere this role is called a fractional Head of AI.
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The framework behind the validation work is set out in Trust Is the Bottleneck and The Validator Operating Model. The complete version is available as a briefing, by email.
The first conversation is thirty minutes and free. You will leave with an honest read on whether there is anything worth doing.