Feasibility reports.

A feasibility report answers the questions an investor or lender will ask, before they ask them. Can this be delivered? At what cost? Over what period? Into what market? And what has to go right for the numbers to hold?

It is not a sales document. A feasibility report that only contains good news is worthless, because the first person to examine it properly will find what is missing — and will then doubt everything else in it.

• Project definition — scope, phases, dependencies, and what completion actually means.
• Technical feasibility — can it be built or delivered with the resources available.
• Commercial feasibility — market size, demand evidence, competition, pricing.
• Financial feasibility — costs, timeline, cash requirement, sensitivity to the things most likely to move.
• Risk register — what could go wrong, how likely, and what mitigates it.
• Assumption schedule — every material assumption listed, with its source.
• Conclusion — proceed, proceed with changes, or do not proceed.

The most important convention in our reports is the distinction between what we have independently verified and what the project owner has told us. Both appear; they are never blended.

Investors look for exactly this. A report that presents an owner's revenue projection with the same authority as a surveyor's cost estimate tells the reader that nobody checked. Separating them tells the reader that somebody did.

Before you approach investors, not during. A feasibility study produced in response to investor questions carries a fraction of the weight of one produced before those questions were asked — because the first is evidence, and the second looks like a defence.

It is also considerably cheaper to discover a problem at this stage than after capital has been committed to it.

Where the report concludes the project is viable, it becomes the evidential foundation of the Investment Memorandum and the basis on which finance is arranged.

Where it concludes the project is not viable in its current form, it sets out what would have to change. Occasionally the conclusion is that a project should not proceed at all. We will say so, and that is a good outcome at this stage rather than a failure.