Advisory and corporate finance
We caught up with Marina and Adrian to discuss how founders can deal with difficult relationships in the board room with investors. Marina Traversari is a Board Advisor, Link Stone Advisory who has founded, scaled and exited business as senior executive, Chair and Board Advisor and draws from experience at Spherics, Gapsquare, Sage, Oracle and … Continue reading Managing difficult investors in the Board Room
In 2025, raising equity is no longer just about the “Hockey Stick” growth chart. It is about transparency. Investors—whether VCs or Angels—are demanding a level of data integrity and ESG compliance that most Series A companies simply don’t have. Richard Spilsbury discusses this shift with Marina Traversari. Having moved from scaling Spherics (a carbon accounting … Continue reading The “Glass Box” Business: Why Transparency (and ESG) is Your New Valuation Multiplier
Leading a business in a stable market is management. Leading a business when the market is collapsing and reinventing itself? That is transformation. Many established businesses today are facing their “Netflix Moment”—the need to pivot to digital without killing their core cash flow.In this interview, Richard Spilsbury talks to Robert Price, a veteran CEO who … Continue reading The Secrets to Successful Business Pivot Strategies
Build and buy strategies are where a business acquires other businesses, very often to help increase value ahead of an exit. They are not uncommon for private equity or companies trading on a public exchange and can also work for smaller businesses but are less common. Build and buy strategies can be an attractive way … Continue reading Thinking about Build and Buy?
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast”, someone once said. Based on extensive research, Groysberg, Lee, Price and Cheng reported in the Harvard Business Review that: Their findings are not surprising and are consistent with many other studies. What is more surprising is how little leaders understand about their culture, the values and behaviours that are understood … Continue reading Is your business culture holding you back?
A recent report by Be The Business that compared productivity in the UK compared to other G7 countries noted that the UK fell far behind (sixth!) most other countries when it comes to undertaking employee engagement initiatives. Given the importance and clear benefits of employee engagement, the key issue is why wouldn’t leaders seek to … Continue reading Four barriers to employee engagement
The benefits of creating an innovative culture in the business context are recurring themes for fast growing companies in that it promotes; Despite its importance, according to a McKinsey Survey, 95% of executives are dissatisfied with the innovation performance in their business. At a high level, the positive behaviours to encourage innovation are just not … Continue reading Five behaviours to promote innovation
If you are a scale up business, you know there is some market fit and you will have felt at times that “sales is working”, so it can be very frustrating when sales growth stalls. The Scale up Institute states that the “markets gap” is one of the key barriers to further growth, their focus … Continue reading Unleash Your Sales Potential: Overcoming Growth Hurdles in Scale-Up Businesses
If you are a scale up business, you know the challenges of aligning the development of talent and productivity. The Scale Up Institute lists access to talent as one of the key “significant pain points and barriers to scale further”. To resolve the issue they focus on the education system in lobbying the Government. Without … Continue reading Talent and productivity gap: Solving the challenges for scale up businesses
If you are a scale up business, you will already be familiar with the challenge of growing with limited financial resources. Our article ‘Considerations for Scale-ups when raising funds’ outlines some of the common solutions in addition to fundraising support we provide clients. Do you lack financing to sufficiently scale? The Scale Up Institute notes … Continue reading Access to Finance Challenges for Scale up Businesses