Performance gets you the meeting. Operations decides it. These are the questions an operational due diligence team will put to an emerging manager, and the two where the bar has quietly moved.
Every serious ODD review of a small manager works through some version of the following. The wording varies, the substance does not.
A manager with an administrator and a prime broker can answer all of these somehow. The difference between an adequate answer and a strong one is whether it is asserted or evidenced, and whether the evidence is current or was assembled the week before the meeting.
Cyber security. The old version was 'do you have a policy'. The current version is whether the controls behind the policy are effective, who has tested them, and what certification the firm itself holds, as opposed to the certifications of its hosting providers. Claiming your infrastructure provider's badge as your own is the kind of thing an ODD team checks, and finding it undermines every other answer in the pack.
The supply chain. Your positions, cash and investor records sit with your administrator, your brokers and your bank. The honest answer to 'are your controls effective' therefore depends on control environments you do not own and cannot test. The strong answer names the parties holding fund data, states plainly which assurance reports the firm holds and which it does not, and shows that the seam is monitored: a provider feed that stops arriving should surface as an operational event the same morning, not as a surprise at month end.
Start from the assumption that the reviewer has seen a thousand confident summaries and is paid to find the gap between the summary and the records. The preparation that works is not polishing the narrative. It is being able to produce, in one sitting, the evidence behind any line in it: this morning's NAV tie-out, the fee verification, the break history, the last restore drill. That is what the platform generates, and you can see it working on the live demo with no call and no login.