Private Equity Editing and Proofreading Services

Private equity documents are written to persuade in one direction and to be audited in the other. A fund raises capital on a track record, deploys it on the strength of investment committee papers, and reports quarterly to limited partners who have no ability to verify a valuation independently. The whole structure runs on written representations made years before anyone can check them, which is why the discipline in these documents matters more than in almost any other part of finance — and why the gap between an optimistic underwriting case and a realised outcome is so instructive when it is documented honestly.

We edit what private equity firms produce — fund marketing materials and private placement memoranda, limited partnership agreements and side letters, due diligence questionnaires and consultant responses, track record presentations and attribution analyses, investment committee papers and deal memoranda, 100-day plans and value creation plans, portfolio company board reporting, quarterly and annual limited partner reports, valuation policies and portfolio valuation narratives, exit memoranda and vendor due diligence support, continuation vehicle and secondary transaction documentation, and ESG and portfolio sustainability reporting. Our editors check that the case made to the investment committee and the case reported to investors describe the same business, and that the track record's presentation is complete.

The exit assumption is the least examined and most consequential paragraph in an investment committee paper. Every deal is underwritten to an exit multiple, and that multiple is very often the entry multiple, sometimes with an increase attributed to scale or margin improvement. Stated that way it looks like analysis; it is closer to an assumption that the market will be at least as generous in five years as it is today. We rewrite these sections so the exit multiple is justified against something external — comparable transactions at similar scale and growth, the buyer universe named specifically, and what those buyers have actually paid — so the return is decomposed into multiple expansion, earnings growth and deleveraging, and so the paper states what the return becomes if the multiple contracts by one turn. Committees that require this find their debates move from whether they like the business to whether they are being paid for the risk, which is the debate worth having.

Everything you send is treated in strict confidence, including deal material, portfolio information and fund documents in draft. We are editors rather than investment, legal or accounting advisers, and nothing here is advice of any kind; investor material requires your own compliance approval. What we can do is make the argument clear and the reporting consistent with it.