Services
Three lines. Most engagements use two.
Which two becomes obvious in the first conversation, and it is usually not the one you came in asking about.
Commercialization
The situation
The technology is finished and the conversation about it has not changed in a year. Every meeting turns into a demonstration. People are impressed, and nobody buys. When somebody asks what it costs, there is no answer that does not begin with "it depends."
That is not a sales problem. It is that the thing has never been defined commercially: who it is for, what it replaces, and what that is worth to the person signing.
What we do
Buyer definition
Who actually has this problem, who feels it badly enough to spend money on it, and who inside that organisation can authorise the spend. The answer is almost always narrower than the founder expects, and narrow is what makes it sellable.
Product definition
A technology can be sold as a product, a licence, a component inside somebody else's product, a service, or the company itself. Those are five different businesses with five different buyers. We decide which one you are in before anything else.
Pricing
Against what the buyer is replacing, never against what it cost to build. Cost plus pricing on novel technology leaves most of the value on the table, and we have yet to see it do anything else.
Evidence
Every market has a bar of proof it needs before it will pay: a pilot, a certification, a reference customer, an independent test. We identify yours and find the shortest honest route to clearing it.
First pipeline
We build it and work it ourselves rather than handing you a target list and wishing you luck.
What you have at the end
A defined buyer, a defined offer, a price you can defend in a room, and live first conversations that we started.
When this is not the line you need
If the technology is not finished, this is premature, and we will say so on the first call. If you already have paying customers and the problem is reach, start at 02.
Partnerships and Business Development
The situation
Either the technology cannot reach its market alone, or there is a concept that does not become a business at all without the right person beside it. Either way the limiting factor is a relationship that does not exist yet.
Most companies treat this as a list. They build a target list, send letters, and wait. The response rate convinces them the market is not interested, when what actually happened is that nobody senior ever had a real conversation.
What we do
Counterparty mapping
Channel, licensee, distributor, system integrator, co-development partner, acquirer. Each wants something different and is approached differently, and treating them as one list is the single most common reason this stalls.
The approach
Made by somebody who can answer the hard technical and commercial questions in the first meeting. A letter of introduction earns a polite reply. An operator earns a second meeting.
Structure
What each side actually gets, who owns what, what happens when it works, and what happens when it does not. Partnerships fail at their first disagreement when nobody wrote down in advance what that disagreement would be about.
Close
We stay in the negotiation through to signature rather than handing it back at the term sheet, which is the point at which most advisory work quietly ends.
For an existing business
The same discipline pointed at growth: the partnerships that change the trajectory rather than the quarter.
What you have at the end
Named counterparties, conversations in progress, and signed agreements built to survive contact with reality.
When this is not the line you need
If you do not yet know who the buyer is, start at 01. A partner cannot carry something that has not been defined, and asking them to will cost you the relationship as well as the time.
Operating Leadership
The situation
The commercial function needs to exist now. The founder is doing it between everything else, or a capable technical team is running sales on instinct, and the honest answer is that nobody owns the number.
A permanent hire is a search, an interview process, six months, and a salary the business may not be ready to carry. Worse, hiring a commercial leader before anyone knows what the commercial motion actually is reliably produces an expensive mismatch and another six months lost.
What we do
Run the function
Business development as an interim or fractional role, with real accountability rather than advice from the side.
Build the rhythm
Pipeline, cadence, forecast, and reporting that tells you something you can act on rather than something that fills a slide.
Work with the founder, not around them
Technical founders usually understand their buyer better than anybody in the building. What they have never had is a structure to use that in.
Hire and hand over
When the business is ready for the permanent leader, we help find them, bring them up to speed, and leave. Every engagement here is designed to end.
What you have at the end
A commercial function that runs, a forecast you believe, and somebody other than the founder accountable for it.
When this is not the line you need
If what you want is advice rather than an operator, this is the wrong firm. We do not sit outside a business and comment on it.
How an engagement runs
Four stages. The first one costs you nothing.
The diagnostic call
Thirty minutes. We establish whether what you have is a commercial problem, a technical one, or not yet a problem at all. A fair number are technical, and we would rather be the people who told you than the people who billed you first.
A scoped outcome
Not a phase and not a workstream. A named thing that will be true at the end: a defined buyer and a live pipeline, a signed partner, a function running. With a timeframe attached.
The work
We are in it. The calls, the meetings, the negotiations, the pipeline. You will hear from us weekly and you will know exactly what moved and what did not.
Handover
Every engagement is built to end. We write down what we did and why, and hand it to whoever carries it next.
What we do not do
We are not a laboratory, a patent firm, or a fundraising shop.
We do not take engagements where the honest answer is that the technology is not finished. We will tell you that in the first thirty minutes rather than the third month.
We do not write strategy documents for somebody else to execute. If the recommendation is any good, the person making it should be willing to go and do it.
Start with the diagnostic.
Thirty minutes, no charge, and no second call unless you want one. You will leave knowing which of the three lines you actually need, or that you do not need us at all.
Book the call