The firm
Second Order provides independent advice on matters of strategic and financial significance to founders, chief executives, chief financial officers, and institutional investors. The work covers capital formation, mergers and acquisitions, strategic finance and financial planning, performance and unit economics, liquidity, and private fund economics.
The firm serves the range between roughly $250,000 and $25 million, where a capital event carries the same analytical burden as an institutional transaction and rarely gets institutional analytical support. A lender applies the same coverage test to a $900,000 loan that it applies to a $90 million one. A limited partner walks a $5 million fund waterfall the same way it walks a $500 million one. The work below that line is identical in kind and usually absent.
The method
Every model runs through code-level gates before a client sees it. No gate can decide which case is the base case, and that judgment is what the firm is retained for.
The people
Every engagement is led by Sean Dillard, the firm's Principal. The person who takes the engagement is the person who builds the model and signs the read.
Terms and location
Every engagement is fixed fee and fixed scope, quoted before the work starts, and governed by a written statement of work naming the deliverables, the data dependencies, and the trigger for a change order. The firm operates from Little Rock, Arkansas, and works with clients wherever the deal is.