What a decade of independent advisory taught me

1. Trust and loyalty are the foundation, not the finish

Successful business relationships rest on mutual trust, loyalty, collaboration and shared purpose. Without those, a management team is missing a critical ingredient and will find out eventually.

These are not things you can teach someone. They come from personal qualities and past experience, which is why cultural fit and genuinely shared objectives matter more at the hiring stage than most people allow.

2. Independence has a price

I have worked with clients through the administrative, development and build-out phases of their businesses. What I did not appreciate until much later was the personal exposure that comes with being an independent corporate adviser.

When an employee of a large corporation is involved in a failed transaction, the company absorbs the loss and the reputational damage. The individual is protected by the corporate veil. Working as an independent adviser to an owner-managed business, you are the brand. You are the one held guilty by association when a client fails or is accused of wrongdoing.

3. You are not your client

People are not always as they seem. Advising a start-up at arm's length involves stepping into the founder's shoes, sharing their passion, buying into their vision and living their growing pains. It is never the arm's length engagement it was meant to be.

Through that association you are rewarded for their successes in recommendations and new work. You are also damaged by their failures, particularly where the failure comes from integrity problems and commercial agendas you knew nothing about.

4. Motivations are not always as they seem

The most significant lesson came from an encounter with a client that cost me substantial reputational damage. The implications for my personal life, my growth and my values were considerable.

In a way I am grateful for it. I learned where I was vulnerable, where I had been naive, and that people operate to very different standards of integrity. You have to be selective about who you partner with, work alongside and take on as a client.

What I took from it

It made me wiser about vetting intentions and about questioning integrity and purpose throughout a relationship rather than only at the start. Qualitative due diligence is the part everyone skips when the numbers stack up.

I now know first-hand how quickly greed and vested interest can outweigh integrity. The experience left me stronger, and better placed to build and enforce a trustworthy operating ecosystem inside any business.

Purpose wins over profit

The strongest business strategies are built on a purpose beyond the numbers, and on a value proposition that genuinely means something to customers. Every successful entrepreneur I have worked with had that in common: an obsession with realising a purpose they identified with personally.

Owners who pursue an opportunity that way build a following made of the same motivation. Success follows from obsessing over purpose, not over profit. Loyalty comes first, then market share and brand.

Fushi

Rannesh Jansari started Fushi, meaning eternal life, obsessed with making pure health drinks for customers in Harvey Nichols. Today he sells across the natural health spectrum. When I first met him he had a defined purpose: to build on his cultural heritage of Ayurvedic family recipes handed down from his grandparents, who blended oils and infused herbs to make natural remedies. Fushi still takes from both the old and the new, and is still driven by pure, honest, carefully made products.

VirtualIT

David Somen wanted to offer cost-effective IT support that simply worked. His view was that clients do not want to think about IT, they want to get on with running their business, so the job was to take care of the essential but non-core things most businesses struggle with. VirtualIT's services have been sought after across the UK ever since.

Propertyfinder

Estate agents Nick and James Leeming understood the internet as a platform long before their industry did. They founded Propertyfinder to give agents a way to market properties instantly, more accurately and far more cheaply than traditional media, cutting the time it took to move a property.

I joined as the second employee in 1999, as Head of Business Development, alongside the incoming CEO Rupert Morley and shortly after the business took venture capital backing. It created a new digital channel for agents and helped open a market that Rightmove and others went on to contest. Asserta Holdings, the property venture backed by CGNU plc, acquired Propertyfinder in 2001; the business passed to News International and REA Group in 2005 and was bought by Zoopla in 2009.

The mandates behind this →