Working Paper · BCA/WP/2026/005
How to Work with Broad Capital Advisory
Most sponsors hire an adviser to find investors. That is the one thing we will not do first. Here is what happens instead — and why the sequence is the service.
The borrowed surgeon
Imagine a surgeon who agrees to operate on any patient who insists, without an examination, because the patient is in a hurry. He asks no questions. He orders no scans. He accepts the patient’s own description of the problem as the diagnosis, and he reaches for whichever procedure the patient suggests.
You would not let this surgeon near you. You would not accept “the patient wanted speed” as a defence, and no medical board on earth would either. The examination is not a delay before the treatment. It is the treatment’s first step.
Yet sponsors ask capital advisers to behave exactly this way, every week. Skip the examination. Accept our description of the problem — we need sixty million dollars — and get us in front of your investors.
Here is how working with Broad Capital Advisory actually goes. The short version: we are the surgeon who examines first, and we hold that line even when the patient is impatient, because the examination is where raises are won. A capital raise is an evidence exercise, and the labour divides in a particular way: the sponsor produces the facts, the adviser builds the case. Working with BCA means doing your half of that, in a fixed order, before the market is touched. It does not mean purchasing introductions. What follows walks through that sequence stage by stage: what happens, what we do, and what you must bring.
Deals die in diligence, not in outreach
The conventional model of advisory is access. The sponsor believes the bottleneck is introductions: if only someone credible would open the door to the right fund, the right bank, the right family office, the capital would follow. On this model, the adviser’s value is a contacts book, and the engagement is judged by how quickly meetings happen.
The model fails on a fact every experienced investor knows and most sponsors have never had reason to learn: access is cheap and conviction is expensive. An investment officer at a serious institution sees far more proposals than the institution could ever fund. The scarce resource is not their attention for thirty minutes. It is their willingness to spend months of internal credibility sponsoring your transaction through a credit committee — and that willingness is built entirely on what survives questioning.
So the first meeting is not where deals are won. It is where they are scheduled to die. A proposal that reaches an investor before it can withstand diligence does not receive a polite “come back when you’re ready”. It receives silence, and the silence travels, because the community of institutions that fund Nigerian projects at scale is small and talks to itself. The first approach to any investor is unrepeatable. Send a deal to market half-built and you have not merely wasted a meeting; you have spent the one clean introduction you had.
This is why we will not begin with outreach, for any client, at any level of urgency. Not because sequence is a house preference, but because the market punishes the alternative and we would be spending your credibility to do it.
The sequence has four stages. Each answers three questions: what happens, what BCA does, and what you must bring.
The first engagement examines you, not the market
The first thing we study is not the investor landscape. It is you.
Before any engagement begins at all, we screen. Know-your-client checks are not bureaucratic theatre; they are a fact of institutional life. Every credible funder you will ever approach will screen you and your shareholders, and a problem discovered by a lender in month six kills a transaction that a problem discovered by us in week one could have addressed or honestly disqualified. We do first what the market will certainly do later.
Then comes the diagnostic. We examine the business the way a lender’s credit team will: cash flows as they actually run, contracts as they are actually signed, claims as they are actually documented. The question underneath every part of it is the same — what can be proved, to a sceptical stranger, on paper? A sponsor’s belief that the offtake is committed is not evidence. The signed offtake agreement is. The gap between what a sponsor knows to be true and what a sponsor can demonstrate to be true is, in our experience, where most Nigerian capital raises actually fail — long before pricing, structure, or investor appetite enter the conversation.
The diagnostic can end in an answer sponsors do not expect from an adviser: not yet. Not “no” — not yet, with a specific account of what is missing and a plan to build it. This answer is worth more than it feels like at the time. It is the difference between spending six months becoming fundable and spending six months becoming known as the deal that didn’t survive questions.
Your documents as they exist, not as you wish they were; candour about the weaknesses you already know; and the principal’s own time. A diagnostic run against a gatekeeper produces a diagnosis of the gatekeeper.
The deal is built before it is shown
Diagnosis tells us what is true. Structuring decides what the transaction is.
In this stage the deal takes its final shape: how much capital, in what instruments, secured how, repaid from what, on what assumptions. We build the financial model to institutional standard and then subject it to internal verification before any external party relies on it — a discipline we apply without exception, because a model error found by an investor does not cost you a correction; it costs you the investor’s confidence in everything else you have shown them. The same rule governs the transaction materials. Nothing leaves the building until it has survived our own adversarial review, which is designed to be harder than the market’s.
Sponsors sometimes experience this stage as invisible. The market is not being contacted; nothing external appears to be happening. What is happening is that every question an investor will ask is being asked first, by us, while the answers can still be fixed.
Decisions, made at the speed of the work — structure choices sit with you, and a sponsor who takes three weeks to choose stalls the entire engagement; data, promptly and completely; and patience with verification, including our verification of things you have already told us. We are not doubting you. We are building the file that lets a stranger not have to trust you.
Outreach is sequenced, confidential, and never public
Only now does the market enter.
Outreach is run in waves, to selected institutions matched to the transaction — never as a blast, and never publicly. No materials move to anyone until confidentiality terms are in place. You will not see your deal marketed on the open internet, and you should be alarmed by any adviser who would put it there, because public solicitation is both a regulatory question and a signal to serious investors that a deal is being shopped indiscriminately.
When investors engage, the work becomes diligence management: questions arrive, and the speed and quality of the answers become evidence in their own right. An investor cannot see your operations from Lagos or London; what they can see is how your organisation behaves under questioning. Crisp, documented, consistent answers read as competence. Slow or shifting answers read as risk, whatever the underlying truth.
Responsiveness, and a single voice. Diligence answered by three executives with three versions of the truth undoes months of preparation. We coordinate the answers; you make sure your organisation gives us one set of facts to coordinate.
The close is the midpoint
The wire transfer is not the finish line. It is the point where your relationship with institutional capital begins.
Funded transactions carry obligations — reporting, covenants, conditions that run for years — and the sponsors who treat these as an afterthought convert a successful raise into a distressed relationship. The ones who treat them seriously discover the compounding asset hidden inside: a clean performance record with one institution is the cheapest evidence you will ever own, and it prices your next raise before a single new document is written. The second raise, done properly, is faster and cheaper than the first — but only for sponsors who sustained the first.
We stay engaged through this stage: monitoring, reporting discipline, and the ongoing management of the lender or investor relationship. Capital advisory done properly is not a transaction. It is the start of a balance sheet relationship.
What to bring on day one
The engagement begins with a conversation, not a pitch. Come ready to discuss the business as it is.
Practically, the first meeting goes furthest when you arrive with: your financial statements, audited where they exist and management accounts where they do not; your corporate and ownership documents; the contracts that carry the business — offtake, supply, EPC, leases, licences; whatever financial model exists, including none, honestly stated; and your prior fundraising correspondence, especially the rejections. Rejections are the most useful documents a sponsor owns. They are free diligence, performed by the market, telling us exactly where the file failed last time.
If we proceed, the engagement is formalised in an engagement letter with a defined scope drawn from our productised service catalogue, so that both sides know precisely what is being done, by whom, by when. And if the diagnostic says the business is earlier than institutional capital can reach, we say so and route you to the right help rather than the flattering kind.
“We’re in a hurry — just take us to your investors”
This is the objection behind every borrowed-surgeon request, and it deserves a serious answer rather than a house rule.
The answer is that the sequence is the speed. The apparently fast path — straight to investors — is the slow one, because it converts a preparation problem into a repair problem, and repair costs more. A raise that fails in diligence must be attempted twice: once to fail, once more against a market that now remembers the failure. The slowest capital raise in the world is the one you have to do twice. Measured from today to money in the account, the examined path is the short path; it merely front-loads the waiting into weeks you control rather than months you don’t.
What urgency legitimately changes is intensity, not order. A compressed timeline means the diagnostic runs harder and the structuring runs in parallel where it safely can. It never means the market sees the deal before the deal can survive the market.
The examination is the operation
Return to the surgeon. The reason you would refuse him is not that examinations are pleasant or that protocol is sacred. It is that an operation performed on an undiagnosed patient is not faster medicine — it is a different and worse procedure that merely resembles the right one.
The same logic governs capital. A capital raise is an evidence exercise. You produce the facts; we build the case; and the case is built in the only order that holds — Diagnose, Structure, Raise, Sustain.
Your first move is simple. Do not send us a deck. Book the conversation, and arrive with your evidence file — the accounts, the contracts, the correspondence, the rejections. We will tell you what it proves, what it doesn’t yet, and exactly what working together would look like from there.