What Makes a Good Investigator?

As with a good meal, a few simple ingredients, combined in the right way.

Good cooking consists of simple ingredients that nevertheless may take time to add to your meal. Garlic powder is easier to deploy than freshly peeled, mashed and diced garlic, but the effort (not that much) is worth it.

No matter how fresh the garlic, though, you need to know when enough is enough. The same is true with a tasty olive oil, or freshly grated ginger and jalapeno peppers. All of these cooked for five minutes and put on top of broiled, sliced beefsteak tomatoes make for a heavenly dish. But if your ingredients are tired or partially frozen, they will not make the meal you want.

The ingredients of a good investigator are simply stated: Patience, curiosity, and humility.

1. Patience: The answer won’t always be obvious. If it were obvious, you client would probably have found it himself and wouldn’t need you. You may need to devote hours to looking through newspaper clippings, securities filings, and other publicly available material. No, AI won’t yet do that for you. Your client has access to ChatGPT as well.
2. Curiosity: Your subject lives in Boisberg, Minnesota. It’s likely you have never heard of this place. Before launching investigators in Minnesota, look to see where Boisberg is. On the boundary of South Dakota. If your person has business in South Dakota, you will need to search there too. If a drunk driving or domestic violence conviction would be of interest, check the county or counties nearby – whether or not they are in a separate state. The curious person always wonders what there is to learn here, no matter how mundane the setting.
3. Humility: Some people love to do a job that lets them think they know everything. “I’ve been doing this a long time, and I’ve never seen…” is not a good way to start most sentences if you are talking to a client. That is because there is a first time for everything and everyone, and this could be that pattern-breaking time for you. If you’ve never seen it, run down the possibility anyway. A guy that everyone “knows” is functionally illiterate seems to own six big houses? You need to run it down until you can prove that the John Williams on the deeds is NOT the illiterate John Williams. Compare signatures, middle initials, whatever you need to do. It’s OK not to be certain. Really, that’s what you are paid for.

So how is cooking like investigating? In fact, I’ve cheated a bit because there is nothing “simple” about wonderful garlic, exquisite ginger, a perfect jalapeno or beefsteak tomato. Many people took a long time to figure out how to grow them and to get them to your store in good shape and for a price that won’t bankrupt you.

Similarly, the investigative traits mentioned above come with lots of training, starting in elementary school. True, some people are “natural” investigators, but only because parents and teachers have helped nurture and develop traits, and because those people have chosen to apply those traits.

And as with balancing the ingredients, you don’t want an investigator who is so curious that he can’t stop and just report to you what he has, because budget ceilings and deadlines always loom. Too much patience may mask the need to try a new approach. Too much humility may get in the way of making a creative, educated guess that can make a case.

The perfect beefsteak tomato need not cost $100 and can be had for very little, given the pleasure it gives when you take that first bite.

So it is that you should not have to pay a fortune to find an investigator who is patient, curious and humble (in the right proportions). Elsewhere on this website, have a look at our case studies. They come with what we charged the clients to get the results described.