Not a wall of five-star paste.

A listed electronics company in northern Taiwan asked a junior strategy hire to “summarise the QoE” two nights before an IC. She had already booked Quality of Earnings for Buy-Side Briefings. She brought a permitted, heavily redacted pack — customer concentration and a large add-back for “one-off freight.”

In clinic we made her split the add-back into what the auditor had tested and what management hoped. The IC memo lost a page and gained a single sentence: the freight item was recurring in two of the last four quarters. The deal still proceeded; the bid was fifty basis points more cautious on working capital. She wrote to us that the course did not “win” the file. It kept her from over-claiming a normalisation she could not see.

A second-generation owner of a mid-size parts maker sat Desk Brief because a bank had sent a teaser and his accountant had no SPA vocabulary. He wanted a valuation in week one. We refused and put him in process geography instead.

He left able to ask the bank why the timeline assumed a locked-box date his auditor could not support. He did hire an adviser later. He told us the studio’s limitation was obvious: we would not negotiate for him, and the spoken briefing felt “like school.” He still used the issue-list template with his counsel. That is as much success as we claim.