Two credentials. Neither is sufficient alone.
Over 20 years of clinical expertise. Multiple businesses built. Both matter.
Allison Puryear is a licensed therapist with over two decades of behavioral assessment experience. The last decade has been focused exclusively on business owners — a specialization that emerged not from academic interest, but from recognizing that founders face a category of psychological challenge that generalist clinicians aren't equipped to assess.
She's built multiple businesses herself across a 27-year career. She's been through a sale process — close enough to LOI to experience firsthand what the psychological arc of a transaction does to a founder, including what happens when it falls apart. That proximity to the experience, from both sides of the table, informs every assessment she conducts.
What neither a therapist nor a business consultant can give you alone
PE firms don't typically reach for therapists during diligence — and they shouldn't. What they do reach for are pattern-recognition tools: financial models, legal review, operational assessments. The gap isn't that firms are ignoring behavioral risk on purpose. It's that no credible framework existed to assess it with the rigor diligence demands.
The reason that framework didn't exist: building it requires two things that almost never appear in the same person.
Pattern recognition that goes beyond what founders say
Over two decades of training in behavioral assessment, psychological defense mechanisms, and predictive analysis under defensive presentation. A founder performing confidence in a diligence interview looks very different from a founder who is actually ready. Clinical training teaches you to see the difference.
Insider knowledge of what the transition actually feels like
Founders are psychologically unlike most people. The identity fusion, the need for control, the isolation of leadership — these aren't abstract concepts. Allison has lived them. That lived experience allows her to probe the specific fault lines that standard clinical frameworks miss entirely.
This combination — clinical rigor plus founder lived experience — creates assessment capability that neither therapists nor business consultants can replicate alone.
The problem was hiding in plain sight
After a decade working exclusively with business owners, a pattern became impossible to ignore: the same founders who were celebrated during their transactions were quietly falling apart six to eighteen months post-close. Not because they were weak — because the transition they'd agreed to was psychologically brutal in ways nobody had prepared them for, assessed, or structured around.
The warning signs were visible at LOI. Nobody assessed them systematically. That's the gap Founder Risk Advisory fills.
The financial and legal due diligence frameworks that PE firms rely on are genuinely rigorous. They just weren't built to answer the question that determines whether a roll-up integration succeeds or fails: is this founder psychologically ready for the transition they're about to experience?
Founder Risk Advisory was built to answer that question with the same rigor PE firms apply to everything else.
Why you can't replicate this with an internal interview
PE firms that review the assessment framework sometimes ask whether existing deal team members could conduct these evaluations. The six domains appear straightforward. The questions seem like common sense. But knowing what to ask is roughly 10% of behavioral assessment.
Interpreting what you're observing — accounting for defensive presentation, unconscious psychological mechanisms, and affect that contradicts verbal content — is the other 90%. Here's what that looks like in practice:
| A business professional hears | A clinician observes |
| "I'm totally ready for this." | Defensive overconfidence. No acknowledgment of normal ambivalence. Dismissive affect when discussing loss. High-risk denial pattern. |
| "My spouse is completely supportive." | Statement delivered with tight jaw, avoided eye contact, immediate topic shift. Unresolved marital conflict — a known integration risk factor. |
| "This founder is rational and unemotional. Low risk." | Defensive intellectualization masking profound loss. When financial rationalization breaks down post-close, decompensation is highly probable. |
Clinical training teaches pattern recognition under defensive presentation, reading process and affect rather than just verbal content, recognizing psychological defense mechanisms, and predicting behavior under conditions that haven't occurred yet. This expertise requires years of clinical practice to develop. It cannot be replicated by reading a framework.
when deal breaks late-stage
post-close transition
full integration failure
Every assessment is personally conducted by Allison
No junior assessors. No delegated interviews.
Over two decades of clinical expertise in every evaluation.