The other side of the gate

You want to accept a new allocator. Here's what that costs. Compliance review: 3-5 days. Fund admin setup: 1-2 weeks. Wire reconciliation: days of emails because the bank deducted a $25 fee and the amount doesn't match. Total cost to onboard one allocator: $5,000-$10,000 in hard costs. Two to six weeks in elapsed time. This is why your minimum is $500K. Not because the strategy needs it. Because the plumbing does.

You're a $50M fund. You're not Goldman Sachs. You don't have a private wealth division or a cap intro team. Your distribution strategy is: people who already know you. That's it. Your track record is exceptional. Your ability to put that track record in front of people who need it is zero.

Every month, you produce a report. NAV calculation, performance attribution, fee reconciliation, investor statements. The report goes out as a PDF. To every allocator individually. You spend three to five days a month on reporting. Three to five days you're not improving your model, not researching new signals, not doing the one thing your allocators actually pay you to do. The infrastructure tax isn't just money. It's your time. And for a fund manager, time is literally alpha.

You know your returns are real. You traded them. You can show the execution logs, the exchange records, the daily P&L. But your allocator doesn't see any of that. They see a PDF. Produced by you. Confirmed by an administrator who got the numbers from you. The entire trust chain is circular. The irony: you want independent verification. Because every fund that faked their numbers makes your legitimate returns harder to sell.

Now flip the camera one more time. You're a wealth advisor. 80 clients, 3 strategies each: 240 onboarding processes. 240 PDFs. 240 reconciliations. You became an advisor to help people. The infrastructure turned you into a clerk.