The personal guarantee is the most consequential document most founders will ever sign, and it is routinely signed in the last ten minutes of a funding process, alongside the standing order mandate, by someone who has stopped reading carefully because …
Manufacturing and consumer goods businesses come to consultants later than most sectors, and usually with a sharper problem. By the time a producer picks up the phone, there is normally a specific event behind it: a major customer has demanded …
Most professional services firms are not businesses. They are collections of skilled individuals sharing an office, a brand and an indemnity policy, and the distinction becomes painfully clear at exactly two moments: when a partner leaves, and when someone tries …
I spent years at VMware and Dell EMC before I started consulting, and the pattern I saw inside those businesses is the same one I now see across technical founders every week. Engineering quality and commercial viability are almost entirely …
First-time founders arrive at my desk with one of two problems, and they almost always think they have the other one. The first group believe they have a funding problem and actually have a validation problem. The second group believe …
Most founders who ask me to introduce them to investors are not ready, and almost none of them know it. They have a deck, they have a forecast, they have a number in mind, and they have the entirely reasonable …
Legal admin is the work founders defer most reliably, and the reason is entirely rational: none of it makes the phone ring. Nobody ever won a customer because their shareholders’ agreement was in order. So it waits, and it keeps …
Business insurance is bought in one of two states of mind. Either a client has demanded evidence of cover by Friday, or something has gone wrong, and the founder is finding out what they were not covered for. Neither is …
Outsourcing decisions in small businesses are almost never made as decisions. They happen when a founder reaches the end of a difficult month, concludes they cannot keep doing the bookkeeping at eleven at night, and hires the first bookkeeper who …
Every founder can tell you roughly what is in the bank. Far fewer can tell you what that figure means, which is the only question that matters. Cash in the bank is a fact. Runway is a decision-making instrument, and …
