Helping startups scale — when what worked before is breaking and firefighting is full time.
Contact →Execution is slowing, decisions are rising to the top. More hires, more AI tools — both creating as many problems as they solve. You're being pulled into operations when you should be building the business.
This usually hits 6-18 months after Series A or B. The team has grown – and so have the problems.
Questions you never quite answered rise up daily. What you decided in the room sounds different at the front line. Or someone has taken something mentioned in passing and run with it further than they should.
Most people treat all three the same way. That's why the fix doesn't fix anything.
From there my work happens around you — reviewing how the business thinks it's working, talking to the people closest to the decisions, mapping the real gaps. Two weeks because that's how long it takes to get time with the right people: five or six conversations in week one, then a focused week to bring it together.
Your only commitment at the end is to get everyone in a room to work through what's holding you back.
You'll have a clear picture of where the real problems are and why. I won't give you an off-the-peg framework with your logo on it. But you will understand the real issues – and from there how to fix them.
Properly.
Leadership attention shifts from internal noise to building the business. The organisation moves as a whole.
I spent 20 years at Bloomberg – first as a journalist, then running cross-functional teams across geographies, then as a strategic partner to senior leadership.
Three roles, one discipline: finding the hidden story and fast.
That's what I bring to scaling companies now.
Nope (other than this) but if I had I'd just be bringing the solutions that worked for me. What I have done is spent over 20 years uncovering the true story inside a company, not just the one they want people to hear. First as a journalist, then leading global teams and now helping startups and scaleups, it's the same work: follow the evidence where it leads.
Call me old-fashioned but my relationship is with the one paying the bill and the founder is the client. You see the work and decide whether and how the findings are shared, but the process is built around a collaborative session because that's how alignment actually gets created.
Yes, you get a report but that's more of a byproduct. The real output comes after the report with a leadership aligned on the path forward. For some that may be enough but depending on what the work discovers it can move into a second phase to assist implementation.
I can't speak for them but I can point to some likely differences - good or bad. There's no library of playbooks I wheel out or rigid frameworks. Because I'm not looking at things through a particular lens (whether that's operations, product etc.) the shape of the work is led completely by what I discover and the solution built from the ground up. The work may surface that you DO need to hire a COO but it may also show that's not the real fix you need right now.
The obvious question. For post-fundraised companies the full diagnosis is £10,000. It's roughly what a mid-senior hire costs you for one month - except a new hire needs time to ramp up before they're worth that cost and they might not even be the right solution. This tells you that first. For pre-funded companies that don't necessarily have the same complexity that a full diagnosis warrants, a lighter engagement is being developed for earlier-stage companies (and if that's you, let's discuss.)
Message me to see a sample of the work.