My Professional Journey
My professional story began in 2007 when I transitioned into film finance in the City of London just before the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Soon after I transitioned into corporate finance then trade finance then reinsurance M&A. It was a fascinating journey and in all four industries, I worked on behalf of major institutional investors. My job in all four roles was to find investible projects that met extremely demanding investment criteria. The truth is there is always an abundance of capital sitting around desperate to be deployed, so in business, it’s easy to find money. The difficult job is finding projects that are truly investible, and for 10 years, hunting down investible projects was how I paid my bills.
Over 10 years, across those four roles, I reviewed thousands of funding applications from companies in numerous industries all over the world. And my focus remained continuously fixed on identifying 'investment grade' projects. In corporate finance terminology, "investment grade" refers to the threshold a venture must meet for an investment bank to be willing to represent it to its clientbase. And since investment banks are famous for their strong aversion to risk, if an investment bank is willing to rep your venture, it’s a fair bet that a very wide range of investors will want to review your venture. Being investment grade means you're totally on top of your game in everything you're doing. which benefits you and literally everyone you work with.
And so I found myself continuously engaged in discussions with a variety of specialists (bankers, financiers, lawyers, analysts) who were explaining to me how and why many of the ventures I was finding were not quite good enough. Over several years, through these extensive interactions, I developed a profound understanding of the full range of characteristics that together make a project truly investment grade. When I eventually left the City a decade later, I had the ability to look at virtually any type of business document and determine the level of expertise of the professional who produced it, and what the percentage likelihood was that that document was fraudulent. These days everything I do for my clients is designed to meet this standard. It's actually my primary unique selling point, because the truth is, even if you're not intending to raise capital, everyone benefits when you make a commitment to meet that level of excellence.
I transitioned into social and environmental impact in 2017 when I took a gig producing a commercial strategy for an impact fund. As part of that role, I was required to read numerous sustainability reports from Deloitte, McKinsey, MIT and the University of Zurich concerning humanity's wholesale destruction of the natural world. It was a pretty harrowing experience and I developed a sudden and profound understanding of what humanity had done and what steps were needed and whether or not a recovery was even feasible. Shocked to my core, I continued this research over the following year and my world was truly turned upside down. Did you know that since 1970 we have wiped out roughly 60% of the animal kingdom? That's why in 2018, I made a vow never again to accept money from a client or employer unless they have a strong ethical mission in alignment with the sustainable development goals.
That decision completely transformed my life and brought me into regular contact with dozens of the most beautiful and glorious professionals alive, many of whom I am honoured to now call my friends. My focus today is helping mission-led founders build powerful, aligned companies to investment grade standards so they can access the capital they need to blossom and scale and leave old-paradigm companies in the dust. Over my career, I have had the pleasure of serving dozens of startups, SMEs, and AIM- and NASDAQ-listed clients in the US and UK including FCA- and SEC-regulated firms, and even built a few companies of my own. Through this work, I have learned how the business world operates and I clearly understand it to be backwards and broken. I have also come to recognise that it is the people who are least privileged in professional circles that are in a position to fix it. And most of all, that means women.
There is nothing inherently wrong with the assertive, penetrative, extractive characteristics of the Masculine; but if those impulses are not kept in check and balance by the compassionate, sensitive and intuitive characteristics of the Feminine, we will naturally see phenomena such as the proliferation of war and the wholesale destruction of nature’s ecosystems which will continue to push humanity closer to the brink of total systems collapse. This is why I have pivoted my focus to supporting female business leaders. It is not my opinion that women need more help. Rather, it is clear to me that women are now the most qualified among us to drive the pivot that we need in our world. That is what the resurgence of the feminine means for me; it means the systematic empowerment of women by all means, at all costs, so that we (and all species on earth) can have a realistic shot at survival.
"It is now beyond question that as feminine energy becomes more valued and respected in business, nature’s ecosystems will finally begin to regenerate faster than the masculine is able to destroy them. For that reason, it is my mission to work in service to the feminine in every way I can. And I believe that mission is sacred."
