Disclosure certainty 4/5 debate potential 1/5

Charlesbank requires checklist review before spending over 20 hours on deal ideas

Mike Choe · Michael Choe - Atomization of Private Equity Decisions at Charlesbank (EP.432) · Feb 17, 2025 · at 20:36

Mike Choe, CEO of private equity firm Charlesbank Capital Partners, explains the firm's stage-gated deal origination process designed to eliminate workload creep.

0:00 / 0:26exact quote · 26.3s
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“Within our origination and sourcing process, there's typically three stages. There's no real genius to how we stage gated them. It's really something pretty speculative anybody can work on, but it's a pretty small number of hours that we'll authorize for that. And then in order for it to become something where we're spending more than 20 person hours, we want a certain number of checklist items to be reviewed.”

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