Growth companies typically have well-qualified people, a track record in their markets and great ideas and ambition. However, the teams which provide the momentum are rarely complete and the wider organisation is often running hard to catch up.

Getting from today to a bigger, better future involves solving 1001 – often complex – issues. The challenge is that:

• Investor directors are expected to be experts across a whole range of topics in which they may have little formal training or direct experience.

• Board decisions - around strategy formulation, senior appointments, sustaining performance, acquisitions, organisational change - are high impact but as well-established evidence demonstrates, also rife with surprises and disappointment.

• Structural changes in the economy over the last 30 years have created many more entrepreneurial businesses to invest into – but leadership teams are less classically trained than in the 1980s and 1990s – and so management practices are often more rudimentary.

• Traditional levers for enhancing investment returns, like leverage and multiple arbitrage, have become less effective and so the relative importance of strategic, management and organisational factors has increased.

• The combination of high growth ambitions with blind spots in some of these areas can lead to confused teams, under-performance and stress between investors and executive directors.

Working in partnership

The issues we work on with investors and managers cannot be entirely outsourced: we have to work in close coordination in what is essentially a co-creation process. When we work together, we are on your team, not just paid hands.

Advisers not consultants

We always look to play the role of trusted advisers, not disconnected providers of specialist input. As such, we tend to think as much about what companies or investors might need as much as what they say they want.

Disproportionate impact

Our main focus is almost always on company level performance and value creation. Our name, Catalysis, reflects our aim to create major impact with only limited injections of our time, leveraging company skills and resources.

Blending challenge and support

Any adviser (or Chair, or investor) needs to provide an appropriate mix of challenge and support – and we do as well. However, overall, we lean towards the challenging end of that spectrum because we find that that generates a higher quality of engagement and useful change. We expect to be challenged back because debate produces better decisions.

Management teams are our clients as much as investors

Better quality decisions seem to happen when everyone feels treated constructively and fairly – whether that be a team going through a transaction or a candidate being considered for a role. We work as ambassadors for our clients, not just as technicians.

Innovators and learners

We are activists for better investor processes and management practices. We seek feedback from our clients, carry out research and keep up to date with the latest thinking on growth company performance. This gives us wider and deeper knowledge of what is happening ‘under the bonnet’ of growth companies than most. And it means we can continuously update our toolkit and conceptual frameworks.

Data driven and evidence focused

We offer insights and inform client decision-making through an unwavering focus on the data. Depending on the engagement, we might gather data on individual leadership attributes, team dynamics, organisational effectiveness and business strategies. We use benchmarks and performance predictors that have been built from our experience over hundreds of projects. And we make sure we incorporate external expertise, such as from our friends at the Centre for Evidence-Based Management

Some kinds of investors and directors seem to warm to our style more than others. Our most enduring relationships involve:

• Investors who recognise that current methods for dealing with management, organisation and strategy issues are still imperfect and require improvement.

• Chairs and management teams who are keen to build on recent successes by working harder on the current obstacles to growth and on anticipating future challenges.

If you would like to find out more about how we work with investors and leadership teams, feel free to ask us for introductions to clients who know us best.