Five kinds of work, usually in combination.

Corporate advisory

Counsel to the owner, chief executive or chair on the decisions that set the next three years: where to compete, what to stop, whether to buy, how to fund it, when to hand over. I am not a substitute for your bankers or your lawyers — I am the person you think with before you instruct them, and the one who has already sat on your side of that table.

Typically covers

• Strategy formation and stress-testing before it reaches the board
• Growth and scale planning, including the operating model that has to carry it
• Turnaround, restructuring and crisis management
• Technology and systems decisions judged as business decisions
• Ownership and executive succession, internal and external

CEO & C-suite coaching

Confidential, structured, and pointed at judgement rather than technique. The early sessions map how you actually decide, who you actually listen to, and where your reputation is running ahead of or behind your performance. The later sessions are about what you do differently on Monday. I coach chief executives through Entrepreneurs' Organization in Chicago and have done this work privately for years.

Typically covers

• Stakeholder-informed 360 at the start, repeated at close
• Decision quality, delegation, and where your time actually goes
• Authority and presence with the board, investors and the market
• Building a cohesive senior team, and developing the people in it
• Handling a direct report who is respected, productive and corrosive
• First-hundred-days work for newly appointed executives

M&A, capital raising and financing advisory

More than 120 completed transactions — buy side and sell side, debt and equity — advised and run from inside the business rather than beside it: US$80 million of equity and $19 million of debt raised across twenty-three mining properties; a consolidation of Canada's independent financial advisory channel; a post-merger integration across a 750-partner firm; and a court-supervised restructuring of more than $850 million of debt. Plenty of advisers have closed a deal. Fewer have run the company on the Monday after it closed, which is where the value is usually won or lost.

Typically covers

• Transaction readiness — the numbers, the systems and the story made fundable before anyone is approached
• Buy-side and sell-side strategy, target screening, and a sense-check on valuation
• Debt and equity raising, including first institutional rounds and private-equity processes
• Diligence management and negotiation support alongside your bankers and lawyers
• Post-merger integration: operations, systems, people, and the C-suite that has to run the result
• Refinancing, restructuring and distressed situations, including court-supervised processes
• Founder and family liquidity — partial sales, recapitalisations and ownership transitions

Board effectiveness & governance

Most boards do not have a governance problem on paper. They have a behaviour problem in the room: the same three people speak, dissent arrives in the car park, and the papers are so long that nobody reads to the end. A review names that plainly — to the chair first, then to the board. Certified in governance and climate & ESG competence by Competent Boards (GCB.D, CCB.D), and currently a non-executive chair and director.

Typically covers

• Board and committee effectiveness reviews, internally or externally facilitated
• Director interviews, meeting observation, written findings and a working session
• Board composition, skills matrices and chair succession
• Onboarding and development for first-time directors
• Audit and risk, compensation, and nominating & governance committee practice
• ESG, climate and biodiversity governance: what a board is actually accountable for
• Family office governance and the move from ownership to oversight
• Board–management interface: papers, cadence, and what is decided where

Executive team facilitation

An executive team that agrees in the meeting and relitigates it afterwards does not have a communication problem; it has an unresolved disagreement about priorities, or about who decides. Facilitation here is not an away-day with flipcharts. It is getting the real disagreement on the table while everyone is still in the room — the same work I led through two post-merger integrations and a channel consolidation.

Typically covers

• Confidential diagnostic interviews with each member before any session
• Facilitated sessions on priorities, decision rights and accountability
• Post-merger and post-restructure team integration
• Conflict between two senior leaders the organisation is working around
• Follow-through one-to-ones so the session survives contact with the calendar