We Thought It Would Be Spreadsheets. Then We Met the Companies.

We Thought It Would Be Spreadsheets. Then We Met the Companies.

We showed up in May expecting spreadsheets. We got those. But we also got a nuclear facility diving accident, a room full of toddlers, and a student loan marketplace that hit closer to home than any of us expected. Nobody warned us about that part.

Five of us spent the summer at Avante Capital Partners, a private credit firm in the lower middle market. We came from different schools, different majors, different reasons for landing in finance. By August we had arrived at the same realization from five different directions: the work is not really about the model. The model is just where you start.

The spreadsheet is never the whole story

Sydney worked on a deal for an equipment dealer with limited operating history as a private company. To understand it, her team studied public comparables and how they performed in 2008 versus today, looking at cycles, pricing, and buying behavior across an entire industry. Her manager asked a question that reframed the entire exercise: how is this business different from its comps? She had assumed the goal was finding the most similar company. It turns out the goal is understanding exactly where the similarity breaks down.

Sebastian learned a version of the same lesson on a cyclicality report for a geopolitical risk advisory firm. Researching how a business performs across different economic environments taught him that due diligence means leaving no stone unturned, and that the job requires a strange blend of technical precision and intuition. Later, on a different deal, he asked what percentage of total contracts sat with the top five customers. The answer was concerningly large. One number reframed the entire risk profile.

Fabiha kept running into the same red flag, on two different deals. The first time, she was looking at a company whose EBITDA had gone from $4.6 million to $3.2 million to $7.3 million over three years, numbers that could easily read as growth if nobody stopped to ask why they were bouncing around like that. A senior member of the investment committee did stop, with one question: is this real? Weeks later she found herself asking the same thing on her own deal, a salon suites franchise where the CIM showed $8.5 million in current EBITDA, but the whole pitch was really about a $20.1 million “embedded” number, stacked on top with acquisitions, renewals, and locations that hadn’t even opened yet. Both times the takeaway was the same: don’t let the bigger, more exciting number distract you from checking whether the deal even works on the one that’s already real.

The better question beats the faster answer

Chris gained a much clearer understanding of how private credit decisions are made through working on an IC memo for a dental services group. At the beginning of the summer, he assumed the main question was simply whether a deal looked attractive. By August, he realized that even a strong opportunity must also align with the lender’s fund strategy, LP expectations, risk tolerance, and return targets. One question especially changed how he viewed credit risk: What happens to leverage if EBITDA declines? He learned that debt does not have to increase for a deal to become riskier. If earnings fall while debt stays the same, leverage rises and the company’s ability to repay that debt weakens.

Mathew found the same dynamic on the sponsor side. After a sponsor meeting, he asked what actually stops a sponsor mid-negotiation from walking to a competitor offering a lower rate. The answer surprised him: it happens, but most sponsors stay because they value the relationship and the partnership going forward. He had assumed deals came down to whether the numbers worked. The relationship carries real weight, sometimes more than a few basis points.

People, not just positions

Some of the summer’s sharpest moments had nothing to do with a deal at all. Chris sat in on a conversation with Omar Abou-Sayed about three types of power: positional, personal, and persuasive. The strongest leaders do not lean on title. They earn trust and build credibility over time.

Sebastian and Sydney each met women who had taken nonlinear paths into finance, from psychology backgrounds and career breaks to raising families while building serious careers. Fabiha heard a line during a first week coffee chat that she kept coming back to all summer: “I don’t know the process yet, but do you need me to do anything?” Not pretending to have answers, but not waiting around for someone to hand her a task either.

What the numbers are actually measuring

Fabiha talked with a colleague about the daycare industry and learned that safety incidents, like a child left unsupervised, are a real recurring risk, not a compliance checkbox. Behind every location in that portfolio is a room full of toddlers and a teacher who might step away for two minutes. Sydney sat in on an IC meeting about a company helping students find better student loan options, and heard investors debate federal policy and borrower behavior in terms that applied directly to her own life as a college student.

Mathew’s moment was harder to sit with. Reading the safety risk section of a memo for an underwater construction company, he read that in 2019, a diver performing routine maintenance at a nuclear facility became trapped and died. The memo listed appropriate mitigants and moved on, as memos do. But that was the moment the spreadsheet stopped being a spreadsheet. Real people do that work. Decisions about capital sit on top of their jobs, and sometimes their lives.

What we believe now

None of us walked in thinking finance was simple. But most of us believed, somewhere in the back of our minds, that it was mainly a technical exercise: build the model correctly, get the numbers right, and the answer follows. What we found instead were businesses built by people who had spent decades getting them to this point, sponsors who stay in a deal because of trust rather than pricing, and colleagues who ask “is this real” before they ask “how big is the upside.”

The spreadsheets are still there. They still matter. But they are describing dentists and hygienists, divers and toddlers, students figuring out loans, and founders who built something real long before anyone modeled it. That is what private markets actually are. We just did not expect to learn it this fast.