Assignments that led somewhere.

The situation

A CEO who was also the majority owner had a whole set of questions sitting there at the same time. Some had to do with the ownership and needed an answer sooner or later, others were operational things that chafed day to day. The hard part wasn’t that the questions were too difficult, it was that he had nobody inside the company who worked as someone to bounce them off. The higher up you sit, the fewer people there are you can think out loud with without it having consequences in the organisation.

What we did

We started meeting regularly, with no agenda to begin with. A large part of the work was being a container: letting him talk it all out and then sorting through what came up. Some questions we parked deliberately, not because they were unimportant but because they weren’t important right then. The urgent ones we dug deeper into instead, until they were something you could make a decision about.

What it gave

A new ownership structure came into place. The company also invested in a further company in a new business area, and there the role went from being a sounding board to being operational. After a while longer we stepped into the company completely.

The time

A year and a half as a sounding board before stepping in.

The point

The best grade a sounding board can get is being asked to stay. What happened after that is in part two.

The situation

The same company, with us on the inside this time. The quality of the delivery was genuinely high, and the company still wasn’t getting paid for it. Two things lay behind that. The company needed the projects, and you can feel that in a room: a customer senses when the supplier needs the deal more than the customer needs the supplier, and then the conversation lands on price almost every time. On top of that they’d picked up a string of customers over time who didn’t really suit them, assignments that took up capacity without building either profitability or reputation.

What we did

The first work wasn’t outward-facing, it was internal, getting everyone to see the same picture of what the company was good at, which customers it suited and what that quality was actually worth. Only after that was it possible to reposition towards what they were both good at and enjoyed doing, which turned out to be the same thing more often than they thought themselves.

We also taught sales and delivery to work together at the quotation stage, so that what was promised and what was going to be built came from the same table. And then we introduced a principle that changed everything: when the customer’s budget wasn’t enough, we lowered neither the price nor the time we’d allowed for. Instead we put the choice back where it belonged, with the customer. Either we reduce the scope so it fits the budget, or you raise the budget. That meant quality never became the thing that absorbed the budget.

What it gave

The average price rose by thirty per cent and the average project size more than doubled. Customer satisfaction went up considerably at the same time, to a cNPS of 90, and stress in the delivery teams dropped noticeably because they were no longer being asked to deliver the same thing in less time. The figures come from the company’s ongoing customer surveys and not from a feeling.

The time

Roughly three months to get the internal alignment in place, and then fifteen to eighteen months before the effect had worked its way fully through the pipeline, the customer base and the results.

The point

So the customers got happier from paying more, which says something about what they were really buying. Looking back, the honest conclusion is that we should have raised the prices even more than we did. The customers were simply too happy with us.

The situation

The laundry and cleaning industry has a lot of suppliers and a low threshold to get in. Almost anyone can start up and begin selling, and when the customer can’t see any clear difference between the suppliers, price becomes the only thing separating them. That squeezes margins for everyone, including for the one who actually delivers better.

What we’re doing

We’re repositioning the company towards premium, and doing it by packaging offerings with components the competitors will find hard to match. The ambition is to set up a category of its own in the market rather than carrying on fighting over the lowest price in the existing one, because whoever defines the category rarely has to defend their price.

What we’re after

Attracting the right sort of customer, the one who wants fuller services carried out safely and securely and is prepared to pay for it. The target is a higher share of the right customers, a margin improvement of ten per cent, better resource allocation and utilisation, and higher total revenue.

The time

The collaboration has been running for three years. After two of them we came in as part-owners, and since spring 2026 we’ve been running the category work.

The point

Coming in as part-owners after two years says something about what we believed about the journey. It also says something about how we prefer to work when we believe strongly enough.

The situation

Founders with deep knowledge of a regulatory area, and a real observation underneath it: smaller companies face in practice the same requirements as large ones, but lack the staff functions that make those requirements manageable. So the idea and the need were there. What wasn’t there was the business architecture around the idea, meaning who the first customer is, what should be included and what should be left out, how it should be sold and priced, and what structure the company needs so that it doesn’t fall apart the day it grows.

What we’re doing

We come in early and build what otherwise tends to get improvised along the way: the foundational strategy, the picture of the customer, the boundaries of the offering, the pricing model and the playbooks that make the work repeatable. AI is used as a catalyst in the work itself rather than as a pilot project off to one side. We’re not lawyers, and we don’t need to be either, since the subject expertise sits with the founders while we contribute process, structure and commercial direction.

What it gives

Fewer of the expensive mistakes, and above all in the right order. Early-stage companies rarely die because the idea was wrong. They die because they built something nobody could buy, set a price before they knew what the thing was worth, or grew without structure and had to start over. Those are the sort of things that don’t show until they cost you, and they’re cheapest to solve before they’ve had time to become true.

The point

Peace of mind in an early-stage company is rarely about knowing that things will go well, it’s about knowing you’re not building the wrong thing.