Everything is audited. Except what decides everything.
In a capital decision, everything that can be counted is put through the sieve — the accounts, the contracts, the market; and the new world counts faster than ever. What remains is what cannot be counted, and it decides everything: the human factor. The key man discovered after closing, the leadership team that fractures, the succession that does not exist — none of these risks appears in any data room. Frontière produces that diligence: de-risking the human factor in your capital decisions.
What the file does not say.
- Accounts
- Legal
- Tax & social
- Strategy
- Cyber
- Human capital.
Will the founder carry the phase that is opening — or only the one that is closing? Will the number two, without whom nothing runs, stay after closing? Do these five brilliant profiles make a team — or five careers? Does the signed package actually bind the people it is meant to retain?
— your eleven p.m. questions, fund side.
Four crafts the market never brings together.
The language of the deal
reading the equity story from the inside — and weighing precisely what human capital contributes to it.
The structured interview
the craft of executive search, with method and constant grids.
Validated psychometrics
the Big Five family, the only one with documented predictive validity, administered within our proprietary protocol.
Frontier AI
our engine investigates the file; the Goban model reads the team as a system — not as a sum of profiles.
Duration: two weeks from the first interview · Format: committee debrief + individual debriefs · Fees: fixed per engagement, by number of executives — most often borne by the portfolio company.
Five moments, one question.
At each of these moments, the same question arises in different forms: is this team in a condition to carry this plan? Frontière answers it with the same grid.
The first 100 days post-closing.
Objectify the team you have acquired, before the first decisions harden first impressions.
The confirmatory phase, signing to closing.
One last look — this time at the people, at the moment access finally exists.
The underperforming portfolio company.
Distinguish what belongs to the market, to the plan, to execution — before any arbitration.
Succession and the key man.
Read what the house would do without him — and prepare, rather than endure.
The build-up: making the teams converge.
The synergies are in the model; the teams have to meet them there.
Two weeks, four movements.
For you, the engagement takes two weeks from the first interview. Before: the framing against the thesis — the request requalified into the real question, the scope and the people settled, consents gathered. Week one: the structured interviews, the inventories run in parallel — each executive is mobilised once, for one to two hours. Week two: the reading — triangulation on the Goban, the state of the engine, the state of the transmission, the fulcrum — then production, under judgment. At the end: a committee debrief, a dated and owned roadmap, and an individual debrief for every person assessed.
The engagement deploys as soon as fair access to the people and their consent exist: most often between signing and closing, or in the first hundred days; under exclusivity, with the seller's agreement and the executives' consent.
And after the report?
An assessment always ends in recommendations: a CFO to recruit, a governance to rearm, an advisory board to build. That is where everything is usually lost: the report is filed away, and execution starts from zero — with a headhunter who has never seen the team. Frontière carries what follows.
The search for the key people the reading has designated — briefed by the diagnosis, not by a job description. Vision work, governance design, the constitution of advisory boards.
Executive coaching, interim management, HR and package work: partners we choose, under contract — and whom you know.
The diagnosis is bought on its own: what follows is never a condition. And what follows is billed at a fixed fee, never a percentage.
The eye that assesses is never paid on the person it places.
The ethics of the frontier.
Every person assessed knows what is collected and why, and receives an individual debrief.
GDPR and employment law, from collection to deletion; no automated decisions.
The machine structures and synthesises; it never assesses a person. The conclusion remains human, signed, accountable.
Our conclusions distinguish the established, the assumed and the to-be-verified; no solitary impression ever becomes a judgment.