Creating a project

Creating the workspace for a new LBO takes a name and nothing else. The useful part is the order of what follows, and the step people postpone.

Overview

A project centralises the documents, stakeholders and key information for one LBO — its companies, its people, its history and its running processes.

Creating one is almost nothing: the dialog asks for a project name and that is all. No fund to choose, no template to pick, no configuration. The project is a container, and what makes it useful is what you put in it.

So the part worth learning is not the click. It is the sequence that follows, because the steps depend on each other.

What you'll learn

The one precondition before you can create a project
How to create it
What to do next, in the order that works
The step people postpone and then regret

Before you start

A project's people are project members, added directly and individually — there is no team to belong to. Kapitable provisions the project and seeds its first member as Project Admin; that person then adds the rest of the deal team and manages their roles (A2.3).

Nothing else is required. There is no fund to select and no configuration to prepare.

Steps

From the Projects page, choose Create Project.
Enter a project name.
Select Create.

That is the whole flow.

Name it for the LBO, not the company

A project usually ends up named after the platform company, and that is fine. Be aware that it then reads as a company name while actually being the container for several.

If your firm runs more than one LBO in the same sector, a name that distinguishes the deal rather than the company will save confusion later.

What to do next, in order

The dependencies here are real, so the order matters.

Add your team — so colleagues can work rather than waiting on you.
Create the companies — the BidCo, the ManCos. Nothing else can happen first: shareholders cannot be added without a company, and neither can anything downstream.
Add the shareholders, or import them if there are many.
Record the history that predates the platform — the incorporation and any earlier closings — so the cap table reconstructs correctly.
Set up document templates before you need to generate anything.

Steps 2 and 4 are the ones people postpone. An empty cap table with no recorded history leaves you looking at a company that has years behind it and nothing to show for them.

Common problems

The screen mentions a team, or an available team count. Residual — projects take members directly, not teams. Report it rather than working around it.

You expected to choose a fund. You do not, here. Open the fund and add the project to it instead — and funds are optional in any case.

The project is empty and nothing works. Create a company. It is the precondition for shareholders, and therefore for everything else.

You created two projects for one LBO. A ManCo is a company inside the project, not a project of its own.