Investors and founders
Investments that reach
the next stage.
For investors and the founders they back. When growth stalls, the cause is rarely the market.
The company outgrows its structure faster than the organisation can adjust.
Processes get added everywhere and velocity declines. Every stage rebuilds the company. What worked at thirty people fails at a hundred, and fails again at three hundred or two thousand.
The question is never more process or less. It is which parts of the company need to be solid at this size and which need to stay liquid, because rigidity in the right place is structure and in the wrong place it is drag.
We fix that. A diagnostic of what the company needs to reach the next stage, then counsel to build it. Diagnosis before design, always.
What we usually find
Five blockages, five different owners.
Each of these sits with a different owner, which is why they are rarely seen as one system. The diagnostic looks at all five together.
- The founder is still the route. Decision rights were never designed, so everything consequential travels through the same two people.
- Structure lags headcount. The org chart was drawn at the last raise. The company has doubled since and the reporting lines have not moved.
- Tools adopted without intent. Every gap gets a platform before anyone decides what it replaces, who owns it and what it must never do, so the stack adds surface instead of removing friction.
- Capability is hired, not built. Each gap is closed with a senior hire, and judgment never accumulates inside the team.
- Information stops one layer down. What the frontline knows reaches the board as a rounded number, two months late.
Frame
Four domains carry the capacity to move.
Liquidity is the capacity to move resource, attention and authority toward the problem rather than hold them in place. Rigidity in any one of these four shows up as burn without progress. Every mandate starts from a diagnostic against them, answering one question: what does this company need in order to reach the stage it is funded for?
Capability
Skills, talent and how people are deployed.
From the fixed role → to the unit of skill
Workflow
Process, coordination and how work flows.
From presence as performance → to outcomes as currency
Information
Data, sensing and how the organisation knows.
From the monthly number → to continuous sensing
Decision
Governance, authority and how choices get made.
From founder approval → to liquid governance
Who this serves
Three audiences inside the same mandate.
Investors
An independent answer to why a company is underdelivering, plus the patterns that repeat across the portfolio and a faster judgment on the next one.
The founders you back
A diagnostic of what this company needs to reach its next stage, and counsel to build exactly that.
The board
One shared account of where the company is constrained, so oversight rests on more than the founder narrative and the last set of numbers.
How an engagement runs
One clear cycle. Five steps, taken together.
- 1ListenMutual fit, framing the question, agreeing the boundary of the mandate.
- 2DiagnoseEvidence from three altitudes: senior, middle and frontline.
- 3DesignPriorities and interventions, agreed with those who will carry them.
- 4AccompanyCounsel to leadership while implementation runs.
- 5Hand overCapability transferred, mandate closed as designed.
Every mandate is built to end. What stays is capability, not dependence.
Four ways to start
Pick the door that fits the decision you face.
- Commission a diagnostic. Four to six weeks on one company, with a clear written result for the founder and the board.
- Diagnose the portfolio. The same diagnostic on several companies at once, so the fund can see which constraints belong to one company and which repeat everywhere.
- Retain standing counsel. An ongoing advisory mandate for a founder and leadership team through a stage change.
- Start with one founder. Coaching for the person making the step from building the product to running the company.
Four commitments
What you can hold us to.
Diagnosis first
Nothing is designed, sold or delivered before a diagnosis both sides trust. The finding is commissioned on its own, so it is never shaped by what follows it.
Candour
We say what we see, including to the person who pays.
Evidence
Conclusions built from three altitudes of the organisation, never from the board pack alone.
Transfer
Skills and tools stay with your people, and there is an agreed end date from the start.
We charge no success fees and take no equity in the companies we advise. Where the fund pays, we report what we see to the company and the investor in the same words.
One conversation to agree scope. One letter to confirm it.
Most mandates begin with a diagnostic. First interviews usually start within three weeks of the scope letter.
Start a conversation