The Business Context — Why Any of This Matters¶
Before you touch Asana, before you run a Steerco, before you send a single status update — you need to understand the world you are stepping into.
Cortado serves PE-backed companies. That sentence is in our positioning deck, our pitch, and our ICP. But nobody explains what it actually means to work inside that world day to day, what your clients are afraid of, who is pressuring them and why, and how a missed calendar invite can ripple up to a deal thesis.
This module fixes that.
What this module covers¶
Six lessons. Each one builds on the last.
| Lesson | Title | What You'll Understand After |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The PE Ecosystem — Welcome to the Kingdom | Why PE firms buy companies, how they make money, and what pressure your clients are already under when we walk in the door |
| 2 | Projects vs. Processes — Managing the Boundary | The exact difference between a project and a process, why our estimates are built the way they are, and what a "scope creep" moment actually looks like |
| 3 | Perception and Client Politics — The Soft Skills | Why technical delivery is not enough, how to raise red flags before they become crises, and why internal client employees may be working against you |
| 4 | Tactical Operations — Calendars, Pre-Wiring, and Juice | The specific weekly habits that make a Project Coordinator excellent — from booking executive meetings 4 weeks out to delivering a Week 1 status deck that earns trust |
| 5 | The Hypothesis Problem — We're Never Selling the Answer | Why every engagement is sold on incomplete information, why clients hide the truth, and what that means for the work you are actually executing |
| 6 | Discovery, Insights, and Account Development | The difference between discovery and due diligence, why clients resist discovery, how to frame findings as insights instead of news, and how existing clients are our most valuable asset |
Where this comes from¶
These lessons are drawn directly from a teaching session between David Russell and Asher Thomas recorded in June 2025. David spent 90 minutes walking through the full picture of why Cortado exists, how PE deals work, and what a Project Coordinator needs to understand in order to be effective.
Rather than a textbook framing, these lessons are written in the same voice David used in that session — blunt, real-world, and free of corporate jargon.
How to use this module¶
Read all six lessons before Week 1 of the main curriculum. They are not long. They are dense. Take notes. The knowledge checks at the end of each lesson are not graded — they are designed to force you to apply what you just read to a real scenario before you move on.
By the time you finish Lesson 4, the rest of the onboarding curriculum — the tools, the Steercos, the status formats, the stakeholder management — should have a "why" attached to it that it did not have before.