You Can’t Find What You’re Not Looking For
I think everyone’s aware by now of the kerfuffle involving the Chinese spy balloon that went right over Permanent Equity’s HQ in Columbia, Missouri, and was then shot down by fighter jets off the coast of South Carolina. One of the more interesting parts of the story to me is how we’re now seeing these types of aircrafts popping up more and more because NORAD “tweaked” our radar filters to start looking for small, slow-moving objects.
I mean, were we not doing this before? Do the people who keep us safe not remember that big things come in small packages and that the tortoise beat the hare?
I’m half kidding; I lived in DC when small envelopes of suspected anthrax terrorized the US Capitol.
But this latest experience is a powerful reminder that you can’t find what you’re not looking for.
One of our favorite questions to ask others is what keeps them up at night. And I can tell you that in my role one of the things that keeps me up at night is the idea of missing something in due diligence and investing our partners’ money for 27 years in a business that is not what we thought it was or with people who are not who we thought they were. We have lots of systems and processes in place to mitigate this risk, but it still is one. And we’re always paranoid about what we’re not looking for.
We can do phase ones, get background checks, reconcile numbers, etc. Heck, we just hired a certified fraud examiner. But unless you’re willing and able to be cynical and paranoid all of the time, it’s likely you are at some point going to assume something is harmless, let it slip by, and it will turn out to bite you. And that’s manageable, provided it doesn’t happen often, but recognize that it will and know how you might respond when it does.
