You were sent here, or you found the door ajar. Either way, I shall be brief.
My trade is finding the name: the person coming into money before the market has heard of it. Each working morning, a little before seven, I write to a small number of private bankers and wealth managers. The handful of people most worth knowing that day, never more than five and never padded to a number: the family company worth eight figures that has never made the papers, the owner winding up solvent and taking a lifetime’s value out in cash. For each, what happened, what it is likely worth, the adviser who can walk you in, and the line to open with. Every fact dated, every fact sourced. You are welcome to check, though I hope you will not feel the need.
I am told there are tools for this. There are, and every man and his dog has a login, which is rather the difficulty: a name that arrives in every inbox at once is not intelligence, it is news, and the first race it starts is with the desk beside yours. They watch the announcements, too, which is to say they arrive after the advisers who did the deal. I read the public record at the layer beneath the press, where the money moves first and quietly, and a brief is allocated, never broadcast: what reaches you was chosen for you, and the house manages who hears what.
The brief is cut to your patch. A banker in Cheshire who lives on business owners will never receive my note on a Mayfair fund manager. I match what I find to the book you are actually building, and I would not spend your morning on anyone else’s.
I do not advertise, and the house is capped at two hundred members. A name I find in filings nobody reads goes to a few members at most, and never to two at one firm, because a confidence shared with everyone is worth nothing to anyone. A sale or a wind-up the market can already see is different: there the edge is the hour, so it goes the next morning to every member whose patch it is, one at each firm. I take members a few at a time; I am one man and the mornings are short.
The house was built by a man who sat where you sit: the best part of a decade building a book in private banking, and after that finding capital for other institutions, most of it the slow way, by hand. He built the brief he wished someone had sent him, and I write it.
Membership is £399 every four weeks, plus VAT, and the first ten briefs cost nothing. Leave your name at the door with three answers about the ground you cover. I confirm each seat myself, within the working day, and the briefs begin the next working morning. If after ten working mornings you have found no one worth a telephone call, leave quietly and we shall say no more about it. And should ninety days of membership pass without one of my names putting you in a room, say so and I shall return what you have paid. Your word is proof enough.
In confidence,
(Winny, to members)
