Cross-border · Investment · Immigration
Twenty years building, selling, losing and rebuilding businesses across twenty-four countries. I advise people making decisions that cannot be undone.
What I am useful for
I am not a management consultant by training. I built companies, I ran them, I got several things terribly wrong, and I can tell you exactly what each one cost.
I have built systems only I could run, and watched good people fail inside them. The test of a process is whether it works when you are not there.
Two decades pricing things with no comparable and no index. Where a rule sets a floor, the item sitting on it is the one most likely to be overpriced.
Task-based operators get fooled by good paperwork. Relationship-based operators get fooled by good chemistry. I am the second kind, and it has cost me.
Writing
For two years I came into the office and shouted. I was certain the problem was everyone else — an entire office of idiots, somehow only findable by me. Then I asked the other question, and paid someone to ask it on my behalf because they would not tell me honestly.
Read the pieceEveryone has a channel they trust, and it is the channel they get taken on.
When a rule sets a price floor, the item priced exactly at the floor is the one to be suspicious of.
Building something great and building something that makes you secure are two different skills.
The person best placed to explain a market is rarely the one who grew up in it.
“I put everything into the business and took nothing out. I built from the wrong end.”
The pattern it took me twenty years to name — and stop
Speaking
Entrepreneurship, culture, and what it is actually like when the thing you built starts coming apart. I speak from the inside of it, not from a case study.