A third IR client is asking and my quarter-end weeks already run 55 hours

Also new here, and the thing I don't understand is why the sponsor doesn't just do this himself. Isn't talking to his own investors the main thing he does?

rigging is the piece that gets dropped first, because nothing breaks the same week you skip it. lantern, is this the business you want in three years? 340 investors of inherited mess at $4,000 sounds like buying yourself a job you can't put down. If the answer is yes because it's the client that justifies the hire, that's different from taking it because it showed up.

Question about the boundary. Do you ever end up talking to people who aren't investors yet, or fielding "is there anything new coming" from current LPs? I'm trying to understand where relationship management stops and raising starts, because from outside they look like the same conversation.

How does someone get into this from zero? I can write, I can build a spreadsheet, and I have no real estate background at all. Reading your hours log is the first time this side of the industry has looked like an actual job to me.

I'd want to know how bad the prospect's data is before I priced anything, and you can't know from a call. Client B's two unreconciled capital accounts are already sitting in your name after two flagged emails. Now imagine that across 340 investors and three sponsors' worth of records that were never designed to merge. Your $9,000 for six weeks assumes the cleanup is a six week job. Would you consider a paid two week assessment first, deliver a written findings memo, and quote the cleanup off that? Then if it's a disaster you got paid and you can walk.

The question I'd be embarrassed to ask in person: would LPs care that the update was drafted with AI? I think I'd care a little, and I'd care much less if the numbers were right and the sponsor's name was under it. Where I would mind is a hard update, a delay or a suspension, that reads like software. That's the one where I want to hear the person who's making the decisions.

Try building the capacity number per 100 LPs per reporting entity rather than per client. Your A is 90 LPs over 2 entities and runs 18 hours. B is 210 over 6 and runs 41. Rough fit says the entity count drives more of it than the headcount, maybe 5 hours per entity per month plus 6 hours per 100 investors. Run the prospect through that: however many entities the consolidation left standing, times 5, plus about 20. If they left the original structures in place you could be at 55 hours a month for $4,000 before any cleanup, which is $73. Ask him how many entities file separately before you quote anything.

Raise B, not A. You're underpricing the harder client by roughly $1,500 a month and rewarding the pleasant one by leaving him alone, which is backwards. Take the hours log to B, show him the 70 hour month and the two capital accounts that still don't tie, and put the reconciliation in front of him as a project fee. For the prospect, either a paid assessment like anchor said or a decline. And sable's question deserves a real answer: pay tied to money raised, or your name on outbound approaches to new investors, moves into territory where broker-dealer and licensing rules can apply, which varies with what you do and how you're paid. Get that scoped by securities counsel and written into the agreement, because it's the one mistake in this business that isn't fixable afterward.

You've flagged the same unreconciled accounts twice and he hasn't fixed them. That's your answer about how the next client will go.

If you hire, which half do you give away? I'd lean toward the coordinator taking the merges and the pulls while you keep every word that goes to an investor, because the writing is what they're paying you for. But your log says the pulls are what makes the spike, and a coordinator you can only use two weeks a quarter is hard to keep. Would you split it differently, a writer for the routine paragraphs and you on the hard ones?