A longtime architect relationship, Brian Fracasse, forwarded me a request to help fund completion of a cannabis cultivation build-out in Phoenix. When my team dug into the itemized funding ask, the numbers kept moving. Costs that got more specific kept shrinking, and the projected cultivation revenue for the same building nearly doubled in four days.
I declined to fund the deal and sent the decline myself to protect the relationship with Fracasse, instead of going quiet or handing it off. I set one condition for ever revisiting it: any future look requires the building's actual condition to be verified in person by an independent third party, not by the sponsor's own numbers.
The funding packet read like a past-due accounts-payable file dressed up as a completion budget, with vendor invoices unpaid since May while the ask's own numbers moved every time someone wrote them down. The property was also listed for sale at the same time capital was being raised to finish it, which alone undercuts a completion story. Fracasse's relationship carries other live, valuable work for LIEF, so the honest-broker path protected that channel instead of either a quiet no or a soft yes.
I declined the deal on 2026-07-26. A data room build that had been started for it got halted before it ever deployed. The relationship with Fracasse continued on other projects.
When every number gets smaller the closer you look, and the one number that should shrink instead doubles, the deal is telling you what it actually is.
Nobody set out to lie here, incentives just moved the numbers. The decline was built to protect the friendship and the referral channel, not just to say no.