Which fund risks are worth paying to cover?
Five fund risks priced against what covering them costs. One of them has no mitigation at all, and putting a zero in that line is the most honest thing on the page.
Finance Intermediate Risk Register Pro engine
After you install, this is the model to open.
What Could Go Wrong in the Fund?
- In your spreadsheet, click the Sortia icon in the strip of icons down the right-hand edge. No strip? Click the arrow at the bottom-right to open it. You can also use Extensions, then Sortia, then Open Sortia.
- Click Start from a template and put that name in the search box.
- Pick the card with that name and click Load this template. It arrives on a new tab with real numbers already in it.
This one runs on a Pro engine, and every free install includes five full-quality runs on your own numbers, shared across all five Pro engines rather than five for each. After that, Pro is $199/year.
The answer
- Expected exposure
- $1.84M across the five risks on the register
- After the mitigations
- $1.18M a $656K cut bought with $280K of mitigation spend
- Best single buy
- $60K caps the bridge risk and saves $300K of exposure
- The biggest risk
- $750K a portfolio company missing plan and needing a bridge
Five fund-level risks, which is a different register from a portfolio-level one: none of these is about whether a company succeeds and all of them are about whether the fund can operate. Click Run. Total expected exposure comes back at $1,840,000 and the mitigations take it to $1,184,000, so they buy $656,000 between them. The follow-on line is the one to read first.
A round pricing below the last mark carries $480,000 of exposure, the second largest on the sheet, and it has no mitigation, so its mitigated figures repeat the unmitigated ones and its cost is zero. The tool scores it as a reduction of zero and a net value of zero, and that is the correct result. A register that quietly leaves out the risks nothing can be done about is not a register, it is a shopping list, and the total exposure it reports is wrong by exactly the amount it left out.
The net value column ranks the rest in an order worth arguing about at a partners meeting. The reserved bridge facility is the biggest win at $240,000 net on $60,000 spent, because it converts a likely full write to a partial one. The anchor investor mitigation is next at $75,000 net on $45,000, which is remarkable for a 5% risk and is entirely because its impact is the largest on the sheet.
Specialist diligence clears $41,000 on $55,000 spent. And the retention package for the operating partner clears only $20,000 on $120,000 spent, the thinnest margin on the page and the one everybody assumes is obvious. Note what the net value column is doing there. It is not saying do not retain your operating partner. It is saying that at a 15% departure probability the expected value of the package is barely positive, and that if you believe the real probability is 25% the answer flips hard.
Change that one probability and run it again: exposure on that line goes from $300,000 to $500,000 and the package goes from clearing $20,000 to clearing $220,000. That sensitivity is the argument for having the conversation, rather than for buying the package. To adapt it, put your own fund-level risks in, price the impacts as a share of carrying value so they stay comparable, and keep any risk you cannot mitigate on the sheet with zeros rather than deleting it.
The model
It arrives on a tab called Template: Fund Risks, carrying these columns:
- Risk
- Probability
- Impact ($)
- Mitigated prob
- Mitigated impact ($)
- Mitigation cost
Once it is in your sheet
- The model arrives with real numbers in it and runs as it stands, so you can press the button first and understand it second.
- Change the numbers to yours. The sheet marks which cells are inputs and which hold formulas, and most labels carry a note explaining the row.
- Press the run button at the bottom of the panel. It is labeled for the tool you are in, and the result lands on its own tab, with a written reading of it beside the figures.
Never used Google Sheets? Start here goes the whole way, in seven steps, and assumes nothing.
Next question
- Simulate five portfolio positions, each with a chance of not surviving the year and a value tied to the same funding market, to see the downside range. Free.What Does a Bad Year Look Like?
- Is that margin gap real or just a wider spread?Do Our Two Service Lines Earn the Same Margin?
- How much cash does a year need before it is safe, not just funded?How much cash gives 95% odds of not running out?
- Is your price a plan, or a coin toss against the margin target?What price keeps 80% odds of hitting the margin target?
- What does the monthly transfer have to be for the goal to hold nine times in ten?What monthly saving gives 90% odds of hitting the goal on time?
- A $10,000 product launch with an uncertain price, an uncertain quantity and an uncertain unit cost. One recalculation shows one NPV and tells you nothing. Twenty thousand show a mean of $24,879, a median of $24,291 and a positive NPV in 99.6% of them.What are the odds this project clears a positive NPV?
Every model like this one, and the method behind them: Schedule risk analysis.