01 · Process geography
Who speaks in week one versus week six. How a Hong Kong auction diary differs from a Taipei negotiated sale. Mapping the emails you are allowed to send.
Flagship course
Cross-Border Mandate Literacy
Six and a half weeks of studio work for people who will sit in a process that is not entirely in Mandarin, and who must still write in a voice a Taipei partner will sign.
What you leave with
You will produce a marked CIM excerpt, a one-page issue list with owners, a working-capital peg memo that names the accounts you froze, and a four-minute spoken briefing. Those artefacts are graded. Attendance is not.
You will also leave with a sharper sense of what this studio is not: we do not place you on a live mandate, we do not introduce you to targets, and we do not hold a securities licence in Taiwan or elsewhere.
Modules
02 · The issue list that a partner will read
Eight lines, not forty. Ranking by cash, timing, and reputational sting. Practice deleting the clever observation that does not change the bid.
03 · Working capital without theatre
Choosing a reference period, spotting the inventory push, and writing the sentence that tells counsel what you measured.
04 · Synergy claims under fluorescent light
Procurement, footprint, and “headcount efficiency” as three different levels of proof. Boards in Taiwan tend to nod at the first and fight about the third.
05 · Spoken briefing
Four minutes, standing, no slides. Faculty interrupt. You learn which number to open with when the MD is already late.
06 · Limits of the junior desk
What you escalate, what you footnote, and how to refuse a request to “just put a value on it.”
Instructor
Helena Kuo
Helena spent eleven years on buy-side and sell-side desks covering Taiwanese industrials outbound into ASEAN. She now teaches full time at PageWork Core and still reviews redacted files for two independent boutiques — she does not take success fees from students.
Sessions in English. Mandarin asides when a phrase has no honest equivalent.
Informational fees
Tuition is listed so you can budget. Payment is not collected on this site.
Desk Brief
NT$48,000 cohort seat
Live evenings, marked pack, spoken briefing. No 1:1 hours.
Deal Room Seat
NT$76,500 cohort + clinic
Everything in Desk Brief plus two thirty-minute clinics on your (permitted) file.
Mandate Circle
NT$118,000 six-person cap
Smaller room, extra red-ink rounds, and a written debrief you can keep on the desk.
People who sat this course
Helena made me cut my issue list from twenty-two lines to nine. The spoken briefing still rattles me; I talk too fast when the manufacturing file has a related-party lease I cannot explain.
3.8 / 5 on my own scoring — the process-geography week was dense in a good way; the synergy week reused a consumer file that did not match my sector. I would still send a colleague.
Questions we actually get
Does this qualify me to advise on a live transaction?
No. Cross-Border Mandate Literacy is instruction. Completing it does not make you an M&A adviser, does not satisfy Taiwan licensing, and does not allow you to solicit mandates using our name.
Can I bring a live file from my firm?
Only with written permission from your employer and with names, figures, and counterparties stripped. If that is impossible, use the studio pack. We will not sign an NDA that conflicts with teaching other students in the same room.
What is the real limitation of the cohort format?
You will not receive a full quality-of-earnings exercise. That lives in a separate course. People who want both should budget two intakes; we refuse to compress QoE into a Friday night add-on because it produces false confidence.
Language?
Materials and assessment in English. You may annotate in Mandarin. The spoken briefing is in English because that is how most cross-border calls run from Taipei.