When a company outgrows the way it is run, that is where I come in.

Problem: leadership had no shared strategy. Unpredictable demand against fixed staff caused cycles of overwork and bench time, which wore down morale and a multi-year profit goal.

Approach: I designed and solo-facilitated a 3-day offsite on Rumelt's “Kernel of Good Strategy,” layering in Porter, SWOT/TOWS and the Galbraith Star Model, with pre-work interviews and a detailed facilitator's guide.

Result: the team settled on a root-cause diagnosis it had never put into words, and agreed a guiding policy, concrete actions, and a measurable four-year goal. The feedback singled out the preparation and the live adaptability.

Problem: a 20-year-old lender was hitting its scaling limits. It had a single director, no board, no delegation of authority, and undocumented procedures, with decisions over-concentrated at the CEO level.

Approach: a three-phase assessment, covering document review, multi-branch on-site work and executive interviews, producing a prioritised report. A bespoke National Delegation of Authority followed as the first retained deliverable.

Result: delivered the assessment and a full Delegation of Authority spanning branch to board. The diagnostic led directly into an ongoing fortnightly CEO advisory retainer.

Problem: a VR/AR start-up had no HR policy or role clarity, a weak quoting process, no management or project cadences, and multiple live client projects running without a dedicated operations lead.

Approach: I managed operations and ran multiple concurrent client projects. I produced a business-improvement plan across 11 functions, including HR policy, org design, a communications charter, quoting and finance, project management standards, and compliance monitoring.

Result: handed over a documented organisation with functioning management cadences, clear HR policy, and improved operational processes across every function reviewed.

Problem: the firm was running its field data on a bespoke platform built and maintained by a single developer on retainer, a costly key-person dependency, with no clear basis for whether to keep building it or buy something proven.

Approach: I advised on build versus buy, modelling the full 36-month cost of a one-developer custom build against a proven, supported product, alongside their product roadmap, technology selection and the change management to land the decision.

Result: the 36-month total-cost-of-ownership model put the gap between building and buying at about R1.97M. On that basis I recommended buying a proven product rather than continuing the single-developer custom build, which spared them the cost and the key-person risk, and gave leadership a clear basis for the call.

Problem: two science-led founders, one in climate-tech and one in deep-tech, were heading into raises with pitches that had real technology but gaps an investor would catch: missed competitors, an unclear read of how far the technology had actually progressed, and financial models that did not hold up.

Approach: I reviewed each pitch the way an investor would, but with an engineer's read of the science. I named the competitors they had missed, pressed on technology-readiness and scale-up risk, tested the financial model, and pointed to a credible first market to win.

Result: each founder went back with a sharper, more honest pitch: a clear competitive picture, a defensible account of where the technology really is, and a funding ask that matched the plan.