Services

What we do

Before a financing or listing decision, we work with management to establish how investors, regulators and other consequential audiences are likely to read the company and where that reading departs from the company’s own account. Then we look at what the gap could do to the transaction ahead. That judgement becomes a narrative architecture: one evidenced account of the company that banks, lawyers, IR and communications teams can each build on in their own workstreams, instead of writing from four private versions. Each keeps full ownership of its own work; the architecture only gives that work a common starting point.

The practice offers two engagements, matched to two moments in a financing. The choice between them is a question of timing: whether management wants to understand one priority audience before committing further resources, or is already inside a live transaction window with several audiences evaluating the company at once. Both are fixed-fee engagements. The fee is agreed before work begins and does not move with the outcome of the transaction.

Diagnostic Sprint

For a company approaching a cross-border financing with one defined question about how a priority audience understands it. Typically 4 to 8 weeks, ending in four deliverables: an Identity Diagnostic Report, a Narrative Architecture Design, a Deployment Strategy and a Key Audience Perception Mapping. An Advisor Reference for the teams around the table and one written review of the company’s revised documents accompany them.

The Sprint fits the moments before the transaction takes shape: a first international fundraise before investor perception has settled, the company’s account of itself ahead of listing preparation, or the period after a change of ownership, before the financing that follows. The Diagnostic Sprint brief sets out the work in full.

Transaction Narrative Architecture

For a company inside an active financing window, where several audiences with different expectations are evaluating it at once and the outcome of that evaluation bears directly on the transaction. Typically 2 to 4 months, driven by the transaction timetable.

It includes everything in the Diagnostic Sprint, extended across the window, plus a Multi-Audience Narrative Matrix, an Advisor Narrative Interface for the teams around the table, and a Management and Board Narrative Alignment Memorandum, with three decision points chosen at kickoff and written responses between them. The engagement is confirmed after a first conversation about the transaction’s structure and audiences; where the situation calls for the smaller engagement, that is what we recommend instead. The Transaction Narrative Architecture brief explains when that level of involvement earns its place.

A standalone product: the Cross-Border Perception Memo

Not every situation calls for an engagement. For a company that first wants a bounded outside reading of its public-facing materials, the practice offers one standalone product. The Cross-Border Perception Memo is a written analysis of how key overseas audiences are likely to read those materials: the main perception frictions, identified one by one, each with a surface-level resolution direction. It draws on public information only, runs entirely in writing, and is delivered within five working days for a fixed fee of $3,000.

The memo deliberately stays at the surface of the materials. Where a friction points to something deeper in how the company accounts for itself, it still gives the surface-level direction and marks the deeper point in one line; that deeper work is what the two engagements above are for. If the company signs either engagement within one month of delivery, the full memo fee is credited against it. The memo brief sets out the product in full.

Who does the work

Youxi Huang conducts the analysis, leads the key discussions and presents the conclusions to management. There are no junior teams and no handoffs, and the practice takes a limited number of engagements at a time.

The method

NPA (Narrative Power Analysis) is the method behind the judgement. It examines who controls interpretation and where legitimacy gaps form, then follows those gaps into the institutional decisions they eventually reach. In practice, it sets the company’s own materials against what each audience assumes and has already seen in comparable cases. What the audience worries about now is usually where the gap surfaces first.

Across markets, we draw on selected information-quality principles from the EU Prospectus Regulation to guide service design and internal review. We use them to keep conclusions grounded in evidence, make material limitations clear and describe the risks specific to the company.

The method library is published on this site.

A first conversation

A useful first conversation stays concrete rather than general: the decision in front of management, and what would need to be true before committing to it. Contact the practice to start one.

Scope, fees and terms of an engagement are set in the documents both parties sign; the memo’s terms are set in the short agreement both parties confirm.