A banker's eye. A builder's hands.

Most owner-led businesses reach a point where what makes them work lives in one person's head: the decisions, the exceptions, the way things are actually done. That is how most of them were built, and it works. Then growth, time off or a sale starts to ask more of the business than one person can carry.

I spent fifteen years in corporate and structured finance at BNP Paribas Group, assessing businesses the way lenders and investors do. I led sales and business development teams there, working with thousands of manufacturing businesses and with multinationals across the group's international network. One pattern repeated: lenders and buyers discount how much of the company lives in the founder's head.

Changeover is the method that came out of that view. We find what still rests on one person, build the system that carries it, and prove the handover. The system is decision rights, roles, processes, knowledge and rhythm, written down and used every week. A task counts as handed over only when a named person has run it for four weeks without the founder stepping in.

I am also an AoEC-certified executive coach. The structure moves the load, and coaching helps the managers who take it on to hold it. So I design the system with the founder and coach the managers through the handover.

I work with founders of owner-led businesses of about 10 to 100 people, whether they plan to grow, step back, hand over or sell. I also work with buyers of founder-led businesses, alongside the lawyers, accountants and corporate finance advisers on the deal. One side per deal: never the buyer and the seller of the same business.

Mike's property business, a real client with a turnover around £40M a year, shows the method at work: no holidays at the start of our work, and a four-week holiday from October 2026. Mike is happy to take a reference call.

I watched dozens of six-figure strategy decks die on a shelf. Implementation is what changes a business, so we build the plan with you. I take on a handful of firms a year, working in English across the UK, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands, from London and Istanbul.