About SECONDGP.
This is the brief I wish more GPs had seen before they pitched the desk where I sat for six years.
§ 01 — The Practice
A good fund and a fund a sovereign allocator selects are not the same thing, and the distance between them is bigger than most managers think. The document that explains the distance does get written. It just gets written on the other side of the table, and you never see it.
I wrote that document for six years, about hundreds of real estate funds, for an audience of one committee. SECONDGP writes it for you instead, early enough to be useful.
Same work, same discipline, the other side of the table.
For family offices, sovereign wealth funds, pension capital, and institutional allocators across the Gulf.
§ 02 — Engagement Terms
Six conditions of engagement.
Six things we will not trade away, including for a mandate we want.
- 01
You get me. Every service, every room.
Whichever of the three you buy, it is led by me. There is no senior partner who shows up for the first call and no junior who runs the follow-up.
- 02
Real estate only.
No buyout, no venture, no generalist credit, and no tooling for an asset class I have not sat inside. Six years of pattern recognition in one asset class is worth more to you than a general view of five.
- 03
Retainer, never success fee.
Across all three services. We are paid to think and to build, never on whether you close, invest or adopt. That is the only way the advice stays honest.
- 04
Three ways in, never bundled.
Selection, coaching and tooling are three engagements with three scopes and three prices. You buy the one you need. Nobody is upsold into a full-service package, because there is not one.
- 05
Capacity is fixed and disclosed before you sign.
The number differs by service, and you are told it at the start rather than after. The work does not scale, and pretending otherwise is how advisers get thin.
- 06
We do not advise an allocator your raise is pointed at.
If we are working your raise, we will not hold a coaching or tooling engagement with the allocator you are raising from. Where that conflict exists we say so and decline, in that order.
§ 03 — The Principal
The person you will be working with.
Michal Kapusta. Founder, SECONDGP.
For six years I sat on the global real estate manager-selection desk at one of the three largest sovereign wealth funds in the world, in Abu Dhabi. Manager research, portfolio strategy, and selection across real estate equity, credit and structured. The practice is now based in Europe and travels to the Gulf for every cycle.
The work ran wider than selection. Portfolio allocation and buy-hold strategy, advised up to an investment committee rather than executed on a desk, and the analytical tooling I built to support that work. Those two threads are now the other two services.
Before that, four years at Barings as Associate Director, European Research Strategy. Three years before that at GLL Real Estate Partners in Munich, on the research side. My first decade in finance was as a private banker at Tatra Banka in Bratislava.
My Master of Science in Real Estate is from the University of Regensburg / IREBS, an RICS-accredited programme. I work in English and German; my native languages are Slovak and Czech.
For any individual mandate, that desk was one or two people. That is the real scale of selection work.
So SECONDGP is one person by design. Not a constraint I am apologising for — it is the size the work is actually done at.