Conviction is only credible when the capital is your own.
Our underwriting process is short on ceremony and long on ownership. What follows is how a situation actually moves through WRG, from first call to indefinite hold.
- Stages
- Six, origination to ownership
- Decision makers
- Principals only
- Financing contingency
- None
- Hold period
- Indefinite
Six stages, no theater.
Every stage is run by principals. Nothing is delegated to a process that exists to protect a committee.
Situations reach us through four decades of owner, sponsor, intermediary and manager relationships. We prefer being called early, before a process is defined.
A principal reads the situation directly. We give a candid indication of interest and the terms we could support, or we decline quickly and explain why.
Commercial, financial and operating diligence run by the people who will own the position. We use external specialists where they add precision, not to manufacture consensus.
Instrument, seniority, governance and liquidity terms are built around the situation rather than a template. Structure is where a fair price becomes a durable outcome.
Because the capital is our own, closing certainty does not depend on syndication, a credit committee outside the firm, or a fund's remaining dry powder.
Post-close we function as an engaged owner: board-level involvement where useful, capital available for follow-on, and no mandate to exit on a schedule.
What earns our attention.
Businesses we can understand
Cash-generative models with legible unit economics and a management team we would back again. We do not underwrite narratives that require a new market to exist.
Situations where speed is worth something
Succession, recapitalization, partner buyouts, corporate carve-outs and time-sensitive liquidity needs, where certainty of close is part of the value we deliver.
Structures that survive a downside
We underwrite the case where growth stalls. If the structure only works in the base case, the structure is wrong.
Relationships that compound
Most of our best outcomes are second and third transactions with people we already know. That shapes how we behave in the first one.
The mechanics behind the posture.
- Capital source
- The firm's own balance sheet. There is no fund, no vintage year, no capital call and no distribution obligation shaping the decision.
- Decision authority
- Held by the principals who attend the meetings. Counterparties are not managing a relationship with an intermediary who must sell the deal internally.
- Hold period
- Indefinite by default. We sell when ownership is no longer the best use of the asset, not when a fund life requires it.
- Check behavior
- Sized to conviction. We would rather concentrate behind a small number of well-understood positions than allocate to fill a model.
- Follow-on capacity
- Retained. Additional capital for acquisitions, recapitalization or downside support is a decision, not a fundraising exercise.
- Reporting standard
- Positions are valued and reported through the same internal accounting and asset management infrastructure across all four platforms.
If the situation is real, we will tell you where we stand within a week.
Bring us a situation