A Case Study in Why GPs Fail to Fundraise (And How to Fix It)

One of my clients, a GP I'll call Marcus, called with a problem that sounded like a business model issue. His fund was "fragile." He had no valid business reason to call LPs. Without a transaction in front of him, the phone felt silent.

Forty-five days into our Premium program. Zero ground speed. No outbound motion.

Most advisors would have diagnosed this as an execution problem. Missing sales process. Weak pipeline. Content gaps. All the standard fundraising blockers.

But that wasn't the real problem.

After digging deeper, I realized Marcus wasn't stuck on strategy. He was stuck on identity. And that required a completely different intervention.

Here's What This Isn't

Before I go further: what I'm about to describe isn’t magic. 

This is not some "proprietary framework" that works if you just follow the steps. And frankly, it requires a lot more than a consulting call or our weekly cohort to actually stick.

I've done enough work on myself to recognize when someone else is stuck in permission consciousness. I've seen it in recovery work. I've seen it in founders. I've seen it in myself.

When I look at a GP and see "permission consciousness," I'm not pulling that from a b-school textbook. I'm seeing patterns I've spent years learning to recognize in myself first. And then in the people around me.

So when I tell you what I did with Marcus, understand: the framework works because the diagnosis is accurate. Not because there's some magic or hoo-ha in the delivery.

The Real Problem: Permission Consciousness

Here's what was actually happening with Marcus:

He had internalized a belief that ran deeper than any business model question: "I only have the standing to call an LP if I have a transaction to show them."

Everything else felt like asking. Like cold calling. Like overstepping.

At his age, with his team structure and where the fund was in deployment, his brain had written the story in advance: "I don't deserve this phone call unless I can justify it with a deal."

That's not a sales problem. That's a consciousness problem.

He was operating from what Stuart Wilde called scarcity consciousness. The belief that he had to earn the right to be in the room. That external validation (a perfect business model, a transaction, proof of success) had to come before he claimed his standing.

Everything else was performance. Totally pretend.

This is the same mechanism that keeps people in recovery stuck. The same pattern that shows up in shame-based thinking. The belief that you have to earn permission to exist in a certain way.

And it's absolutely treatable. But you can't treat it with sales tactics. Or some new CRM. Or some other performative b******t.

What I Actually Did

Instead of writing a sales playbook, I reframed the entire situation:

First: I proved his model was already strategically sound.

I showed him an analysis of the current fundraising market. The verdict was clear: his fund structure wasn't fragile. It was exactly what the market wanted. Deal clarity. Operational agency. 

Faster liquidity paths. While generalist funds struggled to hit targets, he had a differentiated pitch solving real LP problems.

But Marcus had reversed the logic. He was treating his competitive advantage like a liability.

Second: I named the actual problem.

I told him: "You don't have a business model problem. You have a confidence problem. Your model is strategically sound. You're just refusing to believe it."

I am not an executive coach. I have paid executive coaches a lot of money. I pretty much don't like most of them. I have had one good one and I think it's because he used to be a therapist.

This was important because it shifted him from "I need to fix my strategy" to "I need to fix my relationship with my own power."

Third: I gave him a different framework.

I introduced him to the identity work that underpins real fundraising. Not through business school language. Through philosophy.

Kierkegaard's concept of despair as the loss of self. The Stoic idea that the only thing you control is whether you show up. Wilde's teaching on abundance consciousness versus scarcity consciousness.

The point: You don't earn standing. You claim it. And the claiming happens before the business succeeds.

Fourth: I gave him three concrete steps, but structured around identity, not tactics.

Step 1 wasn't "build a sales process." It was "write down who you actually are and tell your team."

But before any of that, I said something that mattered more than the steps:

"You are valuable to everyone in the cohort whether or not you have a deal. You are valuable to your wife and your family whether or not you have a deal. Same with LPs."

That's the actual reframe. Not "you're valuable IF." Just "you are valuable." Full stop. The deal doesn't create the value. It reveals it.

Then Step 1: Write down who you actually are and tell your team.

Step 2 wasn't "hit a pipeline target." It was "make one call this week from a place of standing, not asking."

Step 3 was building the machine, yes. But only after the identity shift was real.

Why This Works (And Why Most Sales Advice Misses It)

Most fundraising advice is built on a faulty assumption: that the blocker is external.

You're not closing because you don't have the right email sequence. You don't have pipeline because you're not prospecting. You're not hitting your target because you don't have a sales process.

Sometimes that's true. Most of the time from what our team sees it’s not.

But for GPs in Marcus's position, the blocker is internal. It's permission consciousness. The belief that you have to earn the right to be heard before you pick up the phone.

And you can't fix that with better tactics. You can't “email your way through it”. You can't even data your way through it.

You have to name it. And then you have to choose to claim your standing anyway.

The Lesson

There's a pattern I see across my client base: the GPs who unlock the fastest aren't the ones with the best business models. They're the ones who solve for permission consciousness first.

They answer the identity question before they answer the sales question.

"Who am I in this?" not "What do I say?"

"What do I believe about my standing?" not "What's my pitch?"

"Am I operating from abundance or scarcity?" not "Do I have the right CRM?"

What This Means for Your Fund

If you're in this position, here's what I want you to hear:

You don't need a perfect business model to call an LP. You need to claim your standing.

Your model is differentiated because you built it. 

Your perspective is valuable because you've earned it through years of work. Your idea about capital allocation matters because you understand something most people don't.

That's enough.

The call isn't earned. You claim it.

And once you claim it, everything else follows.

But also: if this resonates with you at a deeper level, don't just take it from some random blog post.

Do the actual work. Get a therapist.

Process the shame. Figure out where you learned that you had to earn permission to exist.

Because that wound shows up in everything. Not just fundraising. Not just in some LP meeting.

That's the real work.

Also, this does not mean your fundraising thesis will work. If you do, say, 80 sales meetings and the thesis does not resonate, that is ok.

Maybe the thesis needs to be changed. Not a big deal. This does not mean something is wrong with you. Remember that.