Advisory for owners
I work with established, owner-led businesses — companies that have already built something real and are now facing a new stage. You don’t need a strategy department or another consultant’s deck, and you don’t need the answer yet. You need a real question worth exploring — and someone who has built businesses to explore it with.
01 — Three formats
Pick by commitment
FractionalFrom 3 months
A senior strategy partner in your business a few days a month — without hiring a full-time executive. Sometimes you don’t need another consultant. You need someone experienced to think the problem through with you — on whether to enter a market, whether a product is worth pursuing, and which bets deserve money.
You leave withA thinking partner on call, and decisions made with someone who has made them before.
Talk about your challengeSprint2–4 weeks
A focused sprint to identify where your next growth could come from, looking past your existing products and customers: new segments, new markets, new business models, and openings created by technology.
You leave withAn opportunity map, 2–3 priority directions and a practical testing plan.
Discuss a Growth SprintReview1–2 weeks
The useful question is not “where can we use AI?” It is “what does AI change about our business?” We look at where it creates value, where it moves your cost structure, and where existing advantages may weaken.
You leave withAn AI impact map, opportunity areas and a shortlist of experiments.
Explore an AI CheckLarger projects run with my team at DOT_DOT Innovation — researchers, strategists and designers, depending on what the work needs.
02 — Selected work
Three examples
Financial services — 2019
A retail bank, part of a major European banking group, had piloted a remote personal manager with 2,000 customers and six managers. Before the full launch they needed to know how customers actually read the service, and how to move people onto a new channel without losing them.
Twenty-five customer interviews, recordings of real service calls, a service safari. Then eight workshops across ten weeks: customer archetypes, journey maps, rapid prototypes, testing, and a service blueprint with an implementation plan.
Launched and scaled to three cities. When lockdown closed the branches, it was the channel that still worked. Now launching in a fourth, with managers given a view of customer transactions so they can anticipate needs.
Energy — 2020
A national energy retailer sells to 3.5 million homes and businesses. Retail energy margins run at 1–2% worldwide and keep shrinking. The group wanted new revenue from the customer base it already had. The team had ideas, but they didn’t add up to anything — and none of them obviously belonged to an energy brand.
One month, compressed to meet a budgeting deadline. Interviews with eight households and eight small businesses, recruited against strict criteria. We clustered the unmet needs into opportunity areas, built seven competing service strategies, and ran the leadership team through a structured choice.
The leading concepts were tested with landing pages and paid traffic. The work became part of the group’s Strategy 2030 and led to a venture studio now in development.
The original pilot stalled when the project sponsor left and the company changed CEO. In a large organisation, who owns the work matters as much as the work — which is why I now design engagements around who will still be there in six months.
Government and development — 2019
A national government wanted to support small and medium business, but had no clear picture of where founders actually get stuck. Support programmes were being designed on assumption rather than evidence.
I convened and ran a working group with the EBRD, UNDP and a national research institute. We mapped the entrepreneur’s journey end to end — the needs and the obstacles at each stage — and turned that into a definition of what content and which state services were genuinely required.
The research fed the country’s SME portal, now the most visited of its kind there, along with a published guide to the small-business development lifecycle.
→ — Get in touch
One note is enough
Whether that is a programme you want taught or a question about your business.
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