The New 52
Did you notice my little pledge? Did you finish my post from earlier this year. Way at the bottom, I stated, “putting it on paper now, this is one of 52 for 2024. Hope you follow along.” If you really pay attention to my blog, and it would make the best year ever if you did, you would notice I’m already behind. I missed a week. Making up, getting to 52, well, I’ll use the oldest trick in DC’s arsenal. I’ll tell the same story again.
The bulk of this was published on November 4, 2019. Not only weren’t a lot of you around back then, but the sentiments in this post remain vital in 2024.
I am, no humility needed, a very good researcher. In many years of doing research, I have learned many tricks. With the robust Twitter LinkedIn community we have going, I am learning as much now as I’ve ever learned. Still, I have always been a good researcher, and I was a very good researcher from the day I started digging up data for Big Firm in 1989. What made me a good researcher from the start was my intense interest in wanting to know. I am quite nosy. I like to know things and suss things out, being told to find secrets is like telling a dog to find a rabbit in the bushes. More importantly, I already had an intense fascination with knowing things that would be invaluable to my job as a due diligence professional. I had written a long dissertation on international organized crime, and before I got around to that, I had come across this book that has dominated my psyche ever since. It was not just those kinda criminals. I was reading all sorts of books on white-collar crime too. Having all this info packed into my gray matter made a huge difference in my skills. Things made sense way faster. Names would mean something to me before I ran the Nexis search. I knew what made me good, and I knew what I would need others to know to be as good.
The business model of Big Firm, like all their Big Firm brethren, was to get the most work done by the cheapest staff. It was called leverage. My job for many years at Big Firm was to take my ability as good researcher and translate that into methods and training for staff below me. You could teach the kids search syntax, you could tell them what a UCC filing meant, but could you tell them who Marc Rich was. If the target penny stock firm was based in Englewood, Colorado, did their antennae go up before they started looking? To be a really good researcher, you need to know a certain amount of answers before you knew the questions. I had one piece of advice for my budding staff to get there. Read the Wall Street Journal.
All the nosiness that took me years to actualize. You could shortcut it with a daily paper. A new edition every day. There were always going to be stories that would improve and enhance your ability to do business research. Corporate intrigue, notable litigation, executive profiles; there has been and even now remains, an overabundance of great stories in the Journal. Which is why they were one of the first news publications to zip up behind a paywall, and one that has managed to stay safely behind said wall. Even if you watch many videos, you cannot read most of their stories without paying. Pro tip: pay.
Like I say, you will constantly find stories that will help you as a researcher. They will teach you how to research and will teach you things you should know to understand what you will come across in your research. You really need to read this story from October 31, 2019 “Giuliani Associate Left Trail of Troubled Businesses Before Ukraine Probe Push.” There are so many great lessons and tips for researchers. I’ll give you a smattering, but the whole point is for you to read it yourself and see what you can find. I could write an entire run of blog posts on the insights and tips from within this article.
Many facts extracted from litigation records
Reliance on other press accounts (I’m assuming they used Factiva)
Financial Industry Regulatory Authority BrokerChecks
Looking beyond the basic name, “working as a securities broker at firms in New York and Florida. Three of the firms were later expelled from the securities industry…”
And the article uses all their findings to paint a due diligence disaster of a report. Just like you could if you were working for me.
If you were, we would sit down at least once a year for a review. I would find things to commend you on—no matter how lousy you were, and I’d find at least something good to say. And no matter how many things we’d then go over, I would always leave you with one direction. Read the Wall Street Journal.