Business transformation has a reputation problem, and it is deserved. Too many programmes begin with a target operating model diagram and end with a reorganisation that moved boxes without moving numbers. We start at the other end: what is measurably costing you, and what would have to change for that to stop.
Strategy and operating model design
Most mid-market operating models were not designed. They accreted — through acquisitions that were never fully integrated, through growth that outran the structure, through good people building workarounds because the official process did not fit. The result works, until it doesn’t, and the failure is usually visible first in the things nobody owns: handoffs between functions, decisions that need three signatures and get none, work that moves only because someone chases it.
Our work here is deliberately concrete. We map how decisions and work actually flow rather than how the org chart says they should, identify where accountability is genuinely absent as opposed to merely shared, and design the smallest structural change that fixes it. The test we apply is simple: if we cannot name the decision that will be made faster or better, the redesign is cosmetic.
Commercial and procurement advisory
Procurement is where mid-market margin most reliably hides, because it is spread across every function and owned by none of them. In 2026 the field has moved decisively past pure cost reduction toward supplier optimisation, resilience and long-term partnership — but the mid-market often has not made that shift, and is still running a sourcing process designed for a smaller, simpler business.
The most common finding is not that you are paying too much. It is that nobody can see the whole picture: the same category bought four ways by four teams, contracts auto-renewing because the review date passed unnoticed, and supplier performance measured on price alone because that is the only field the system captures reliably.
What a commercial review typically surfaces
- Category spend fragmented across functions, with no single owner and no aggregated leverage
- Auto-renewing contracts nobody reviewed, at rates set when the business was materially smaller
- Supplier performance tracked on cost but not on resilience, quality or delivery reliability
- Manual, coordination-heavy sourcing processes that consume senior time without improving outcomes
- Consumption-priced technology contracts with no modelled ceiling
Where AI belongs here is unglamorous and genuinely useful: spend classification and analysis across fragmented data that a human team would take months to reconcile. That is a real application. Replacing the commercial judgement about which supplier relationship matters is not.
Product strategy and go-to-market
Growth stalls for two reasons in the mid-market, and they need opposite responses. Either the proposition is right and the route to market is wrong, or the route is efficient and pointed at a proposition the market has quietly stopped valuing. Treating the second as the first produces the most expensive failure mode available: a well-executed campaign for something nobody wants.
We work on which segments genuinely produce compounding returns rather than one-off revenue, what the proposition has to be for those segments specifically, and where the commercial model is leaking value between the sale and the renewal. Pricing, packaging and channel economics sit inside this, because they usually explain more of the shortfall than the marketing does.
Private equity and venture capital advisory
For investors, the questions are narrower and the timelines are shorter. Technology and operational due diligence is not about whether the systems work today — it is whether they can carry the investment thesis. Most diligence establishes the former and assumes the latter.
We assess whether the operating model scales at the multiple being underwritten, what the real technical debt position is rather than the reported one, and which integration or modernisation costs are already committed but not yet visible in the plan. Post-deal, we work on value creation with the same discipline: named initiatives, instrumented baselines, and a defensible view of what will actually move EBITDA.
The uncomfortable finding in diligence is rarely a broken system. It is a functioning system that cannot survive being asked to do three times as much.
What working with us looks like
Senior-led, with the people who scope the work delivering it. Most engagements open with a short discovery phase that establishes the baseline before anyone commits to a programme — partly because you should not spend against an unmeasured problem, and partly because roughly a third of the time discovery finds that the expensive intervention on the table is not the one required.
Signals this is the conversation you need
- Margin is compressing and you cannot cleanly explain where it is going
- The operating model still reflects the business you were three acquisitions ago
- Decisions take longer than they used to and nobody can say precisely why
- You are preparing for investment, sale or diligence and want an honest read before someone else forms one
- Growth has slowed and the debate about whether it is proposition or execution has stalled
We can help you uncover where transformation moves the needle fastest, and whether AI belongs in the answer.