Our advisers all tell us what we cannot do. Nobody has ever sat down and told us what they would actually do.
We have built and run businesses, not only advised them. That changes the conversation: the question stops being whether a thing is permissible and becomes whether it is worth doing, at what cost, and what has to be true for it to work. Strategy here means a decision you can act on this quarter, with the legal and commercial consequences already worked through.
Dinmore Bell provides business strategy for founder-led companies: market entry, pricing, structure, partnerships and exit readiness, worked through with the commercial and contractual consequences attached. It is delivered by people who have run businesses, on a fixed monthly fee rather than by the hour.
How we own it
The decision, not the options paper
You will get a recommendation with a number attached and the reasoning shown, not a list of three routes and an invitation to choose. Where we are genuinely uncertain we will say which fact would settle it and how to get that fact cheaply.
Structure that survives the plan
Most strategies fail on the paperwork rather than the idea: the shareholder agreement that blocks the raise, the supplier contract that assumes one territory, the option scheme nobody can exercise. We work the structure and the strategy together, because they are the same problem.
Exit readiness, years before the exit
The things that reduce a price at diligence are almost always cheap to fix early and expensive to fix late — unsigned contracts, missing IP assignments, informal arrangements with family, a cap table nobody has reconciled. We find them now, while there is time.
Where specialists come in
This is commercial judgement and contract work, not regulated advice. We do not give investment advice or make recommendations about buying or selling securities, we do not give regulated tax advice on structuring, and we do not audit. Where a decision turns on a tax treatment, an accounting position, a valuation or a regulated financial promotion, we instruct the relevant specialist, hold the budget, and stay accountable for the commercial outcome.
Sectors we run this for
- How is this different from a management consultant?
- A consultant usually leaves a document. We stay, and the contractual consequences of the strategy are ours to implement — the same people who recommended the market entry write the distribution agreement that makes it work.
- Do you take equity instead of fees?
- No. Fees are a fixed monthly retainer. Taking equity would make our advice about our position rather than yours, and the point of the model is that it does not.
- Can you help us prepare for a sale?
- Yes, and the useful time to start is two to three years out. We run the diligence on you before a buyer does, fix what is cheap to fix now, and coordinate the corporate finance advisers and tax specialists when a process actually starts.