Imagine the following scenario. As chief executive of a growth company, you have been working for months preparing a fund-raising process or sale to private equity. During the beauty parade of investors, almost all went out of their way to express…

One way to define what Catalysis does with investors and companies is that we (i) help directors create executable strategies and then, (ii), make sure that the managerial and organisational underpinnings of strategy execution are in place. On the first point, we don’t identify the ‘what’ of strategy…

You’re probably not great at hiring great talent despite being thoughtful, experienced and keen on improvement (these being characteristics of the people who seem to gravitate towards working with Catalysis). I’m pretty confident in stating that because (a) hiring people is almost certainly…

You are, of course, very familiar with financial balance sheets and how they relate to on-going activities (think P&L) and concrete outcomes (cash). Likewise, you know about the category of intangibles, i.e. assets you cannot touch, see or count easily such as software…

A few years ago, there was a major study carried out by the Enterprise Research Centre (ERC) at Aston University which looked at the performance over time of 48,000 high growth firms (HGFs) in the UK. HGFs are defined by the OECD as companies ‘with average annualised growth…

Over the years, the Catalysis team has observed that the two most frequent issues we need to help our investor clients identify and deal with are:

1. At company level, misalignment between strategic ambitions and the capability of teams and organisations to…

It is not surprising, that with so much going on in the news at the moment, we tend to stay focused on coping with the short term disruptions we are faced with: a second wave of Covid, the messy economic environment and the unpredictable implications of Brexit…