Proof You Can Check

There is a hierarchy of proof, and once you see it, you cannot unsee it on a sales page.

At the top sits the public record. A named employer can be confirmed in one search. A listed deal leaves filings, announcements, coverage that no seller controls. A company appointment sits on Companies House for anyone to read, free, in under a minute, with dates attached. This tier of proof has a defining property: it exists outside the seller's own material, written by institutions with no interest in their marketing, and it is therefore extraordinarily expensive to fake and absurdly cheap to check.

In the middle sit named clients and named results, checkable with a little effort, carrying real weight when the names are real.

And at the bottom, doing most of the industry's heavy lifting, sit the artefacts the seller manufactures themselves: the income screenshots, the dashboard recordings, the testimonials from smiling first names. A screenshot of a Stripe dashboard proves someone owns image editing software.

I am blunt about this tier because I spent years inside institutions where the hierarchy of proof was the entire operating system. At Goldman Sachs, Citi and Credit Suisse, nobody moved money on self-reported evidence, ever. The rule was not cynicism, it was arithmetic: the cheaper a piece of proof is to manufacture, the less it is worth, and self-made proof costs nothing. What has always struck me since leaving that world is watching the same arithmetic abandoned by intelligent people the moment the purchase is a programme rather than a position. The instinct that would never accept a screenshot as evidence of anything financial accepts it happily as evidence of everything, provided the video is confident enough.

So here is the check, stated as a habit. When someone asks for your money in exchange for their expertise, spend five minutes at the top of the hierarchy. Look up the career. Look up the company on Companies House. Look up one named deal. Real substance leaves a public trail, always, because genuine careers and genuine transactions cannot happen in private. If the trail exists, you will find it in minutes. If everything on offer lives at the bottom of the hierarchy, self-made, unverifiable, controlled entirely by the seller, then you have not failed to find the proof. You have found the answer.

My own answers live at the top tier deliberately: the firms, the dotdigital Group acquisition of Comapi, the Wolfson Microelectronics and EEMS IPOs, the appointments, all public record. Please do actually check them; a buyer who verifies is precisely the buyer this work suits.

And apply the hierarchy to your own business too, because investors, banks and acquirers will. The Entrepreneur Gap scan gives you the honest internal version in about ten minutes: eight roles, mapped truthfully, free, built for businesses past £15k a month.

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