I built a five-fund, 24-entity operation from zero as the only operations hire.

Standing operational capacity alongside your CFO and controller: treasury controls, close and audit management, administrator oversight, investor operations, regulatory filing, and board reporting, run on a COO dashboard your team keeps. Where the finance principal is carrying both titles, this returns the operating half.

The control allocators ask about in operational due diligence, already running. Deep Keel tests your administrator’s NAV pack against source data you already own: your own P&L, read-only custodian and bank feeds, and the fund documents. Position and cash agreement, LP capital accounts, parallel vehicles, inception-to-date NAV. Extraction and first-pass triage are automated, a person reviews every exception. You get a break register with documented resolution and ageing, and an evidence trail a diligence team can walk. For self-administered managers it is segregation of duties without converting to a third-party administrator.

The governing documents and the cash flows go in together: LPA, PPM and side letters on one side, bank and custody data on the other. What those documents specify for management fees, incentive allocations, preferred return accruals and waterfalls gets tested against what was actually charged, and against the capital account statements investors received. Vehicle by vehicle, inception to date. This catches the drift that accumulates when a dozen vehicles with separately negotiated terms are calculated by the team that reports them.

For managers who outgrew the infrastructure they built on the way up. It opens as analysis: workflows, procedures, technology, providers and controls mapped against what allocator diligence teams actually test, then a gap report with a prioritised sequence. The rebuild is hands-on. Procedures get rewritten and the manual steps come out. A model does the extraction and the break triage, a person reviews every exception and signs the close.

Structure coordination with counsel, service-provider selection with fee benchmarking, regulatory coordination across CIMA, NFA CPO and Singapore, day-one operating model and treasury architecture, investor onboarding and AML workflow, and a readiness package built to survive an institutional consultant’s review. Successor funds, sidecars and co-invest vehicles on a recurring cadence.

For allocators launching managed accounts and for seeders integrating new managers: operational implementation of the IMA as negotiated, custody and counterparty onboarding, trading authority and guideline monitoring, fee and performance calculation, and daily independent books via read-only feeds. Proven across 10-plus manager allocations and two seeded managers.