COMMISSIONS
Whoever invented buyside/sellside parties within typical fee protection agreements should have been shot/hung/submerged to the bottom of the ocean! Typically these mentalities waste time trying to make a career out of a single transaction.
And then Magister Operis™ hears people say…
”Let’s worry if we have a deal first and then worry about the fee protection agreement.”
In theory that makes sense but in reality that is the equivalent of saying:
“Let’s get the buyer and seller liking each other…and wanting to close…and then lets make them wait on us broker jokers to get our acts together.”
In order to really be “earning our fees” it is critical that we not only focus hard to gathering enough facts to know there is an intelligent match between principals but we also have to have all parties in the middle on the same page and perfectly packaged for efficient payment by the payer(s).
A significant portion of brokering deals get killed because brokers only know how to think about their commissions rather than the real details that actually get anybody paid. They waste a significant portion of their own time and the time of others…trying to engineer the boxes within a fee agreement for themselves that state the highest percentages of commissions they can get away with. These kind of brokers will waste lots of your time.
These people will worry about who just made a phone call and should just be a referral, how much a paymaster charges, and want to call themselves mandate when they can barely check their own email and type their name at the bottom of an email.
A lot of these people can talk a good story but the quality the content and formatting of paperwork they can present speaks volumes of the real truth about their passion and professional skills within these types of transactions.
Passing around stretched around Microsoft Word documents that nobody has read for accuracy that are polluted with words and/or acronyms such as “CLOSED” and “OPEN” and “TBA” and “TBD” is a rapid indication that you are dealing with brokers that don’t know how to get on the same page with each other. It is certainly not a sign that anybody is really “earning their fees”.
It is common for brokers to pass around the ICC’s blue and green dual-column NCND/IMFPA document around so each broker can make a bigger mess out of it and thinking they need to sign something in order to get paid. Magister Operis doesn't need to sign anything to get paid. You are welcome to deposit free, clean, and clear funds into Magister Operis' account multiple times a day without permission. If you are a responsible person …Magister Operis is happy to provide banking/paymaster information for you to deposit as much as you want anytime.
The focus needs to be getting all the people in the middle defined, discussing paymasters to be used. and matching brokers that can use the same paymaster in order to make wiring funds as fast and efficient for the payer(s) as possible.
Rather than presenting paperwork that looks like multiple brokers made a mess out of a document, a finished fee agreement should look like an attorney/paralegal gathered all paymaster info from everybody so that one clean professionally formatted document can be produced for presentation to the payer(s).
Magister Operis doesn’t care who customizes formats the paperwork it as long as they know what they are doing. Magister Operis has significant experience customizing and formatting legal documents and doesn't mind doing the paperwork if we can get all parties on the same page with each other to make the efforts worth the time time.