Executive Advisor & Operating Cadence
Strategic sparring and operating-rhythm design for founders, CEOs and owner-led firms — the discipline that scales decision quality without growing the org.
What you get
- A decision-rights and priority map: which decisions are yours, which can be delegated and to whom, which need partner or owner alignment.
- An operating cadence designed and run live: weekly review, monthly planning, quarterly partner reporting — calibrated to what your stakeholders actually need to see.
- A sparring partner for high-stakes calls: independent, discreet, agenda-free, available between sessions when something needs a second pair of eyes.
- Written briefing notes between sessions to externalise your reasoning and create the audit trail your partners want without consuming your week.
- A 90-day plan to lift one named outcome — partner-reporting clarity, decision latency, executive focus, or operating predictability — with the mechanism named.
How we work
- We sit alongside, we don’t replace. Decisions remain yours. The structure helps you make them faster and defend them better.
- One pattern, then layered. Start with the decision-rights map. Cadence and reporting build on top of it. No new frameworks until the first one is alive.
- Discreet by design. We don’t appear in your reporting, your investor decks, or your org chart unless you choose to surface us.
- If the problem isn’t operating discipline, we’ll say so. Sometimes the issue is product fit, partner alignment, or your own bandwidth — and naming that is part of the work.
Ideal for
- Founders and CEOs of owner-led firms — boutique, PE-backed, family office or post-merger SME.
- Operators whose spend is reviewed by partners, investors or family stakeholders, who need professional structure around the engagement.
- Leaders carrying every operational and strategic decision with no internal peer to spar with — and who’d rather not hire one full-time.
Inside a captive or partner-supervised structure
Most of the engagements we run at this layer are inside structures where the principal carries the operational weight but the spend is reviewed by partners, investors or family stakeholders on the owner’s side. The work has to help the principal AND survive partner review — milestone-defined trial, written briefing notes, clear scope, and discretion about what surfaces where. That’s the same pattern we ran taking Primotly from founder-mode to a self-running operating structure, and the same shape shows up in post-merger SMEs and family-office portfolio companies where the CEO is steering on behalf of someone else’s capital.
Related: Agile Engineering & Delivery Performance · Strategy & Leadership
Typical engagement shape
- Duration
- 3-month trial, then quarterly renewal
- Cadence
- 2 working sessions/month + structured background work (~1–1.5 days/month total)
- Starts with
- Decision-rights & priority map in month 1
- Trial milestones
- M1 decision-rights map · M2 operating cadence designed, weekly rhythm live · M3 90-day review
- Exit
- Renewal decision at the 90-day review, against named success criteria; 30-day notice available from end of month 1 onward
Where we’ve run this before
Scaled Primotly from founder team to 50 FTE and built the operating model so the business could run independently of the founders. Introduced operating cadence and DORA delivery rituals inside AB InBev’s analytics and digital transformation, including a 25-person product squad. Operational and tech due diligence across the Abris Capital CEE portfolio, where reporting to PE partners and translating between operating reality and IC memos was the daily craft. See four engagements with real numbers →
Beyond executive sparring
When the bottleneck is engineering delivery rather than executive discipline, that work sits on our Agile Engineering & Delivery Performance practice. When it’s HR, performance cycles or post-merger people structures, see HR Setup and KPI Setup. When it’s AI value creation, the AI Value Creation playbook is the entry point. If the problem isn’t operating discipline, we’ll say so — and point to where it does belong.