From audit to venture capital, reading behind the numbers
Notes from more than twenty years on different sides of the table
I began my career in 2003 in external audit at Deloitte. Since then I have looked at the same numbers from different chairs: as an auditor, a due diligence specialist, an investment banker, an investor, a CFO and an adviser. Each chair taught me to read a company’s numbers from another angle.
Audit: seeing how the numbers are made
Audit is known as one of the “hard” jobs in business. There are long hours, plenty of travel and a hierarchy of its own. But it is where you learn best how a company’s numbers are produced, which processes they pass through and where mistakes can happen. I still advise new graduates thinking about a career in finance to start at an audit firm. The work discipline and business experience it gives you pay off in every role that follows.
Due diligence: the question “what don’t we know?”
When I moved to the Transaction Services team at Ernst & Young, the question changed. It was no longer “are the numbers right?” but “what should someone buying this company know?” Due diligence means testing a company’s story against its numbers. The most lasting habit I picked up there was to begin every analysis with the question: “what don’t we know?”
Investment banking: both sides of the table
In 2006 I moved into investment banking. At QNB Finansinvest and later at Ata Yatırım, I was part of the teams working on mergers and acquisitions, privatisations, public offerings and debt issues, and prepared valuations across sectors from aviation and shipping to petrochemicals and fuel distribution.
Those years showed me both sides of the table. The same company is one story in the buyer’s eyes and another in the seller’s. Valuation is not only a calculation; it is the negotiating ground where those two stories meet. A good adviser has to know the other side’s story at least as well as they know their own.
The investor side: owning the decision
In 2016 I crossed to the investor side and co-founded Mora Capital. As an adviser you prepare a transaction as well as you can, but the decision is not yours. As an investor, the decision is yours and you live with its consequences for years. That changes how you look at numbers. You stop asking “will this deal close?” and start asking “where will this company be in five years, and what can we add to it?”
The CFO’s chair: what assumptions mean on the ground
Perhaps the most instructive period came in 2017, after I led the acquisition of the Beştepeler Enerji geothermal power plant as General Manager of Feronia Portföy. After the acquisition I became the company’s CFO and a board member. Finance, accounting, procurement, human resources and IT reported directly to me.
Every assumption you write in an investment memo has a counterpart on the ground: a budget line, a supplier contract, a hiring decision. That is where I saw most clearly the difference between analysing a company from outside and running it from inside. Since then, whenever I read an investment memo, I ask: “who will make this assumption happen on the ground, and how?”
Today: bringing every chair to the same table
Since 2021 I have advised companies at Fideas on strategy, financing, valuation and M&A. In this work I use the perspective of every earlier chair: the auditor’s rigour, the due diligence specialist’s scepticism, the investment banker’s negotiating instinct, the investor’s long-term question and the CFO’s realism on the ground.
Looking back, I think that throughout my career I have really been developing a single skill: reading the story behind the numbers. The numbers tell you what a company does. The story behind them tells you why it does it, and what it might do next.