Everything that isn't sales or product ends up on my desk, and it is the reason I stopped leading.
The function that sits beside the founder and absorbs everything that is important, unglamorous and unowned. Legal, commercial, corporate affairs, banking, insurance, the awkward call.
A Founder Office is a retained function that holds everything on a founder’s desk that is not the business itself: the legal inbox, corporate administration, board and banking paperwork, adviser coordination, deadlines and the difficult conversations. Dinmore Bell runs it. Regulated advice on tax, insolvency, licensing and immigration comes from instructed specialists under its coordination.
How we own it
The inbox
We take legal@, contracts@ and the escalations. Matters are triaged, owned and closed, with a weekly line on what changed. The volume is rarely the problem. The problem is that each item is small, none of them is anybody’s job, and they arrive at the one person whose attention is the most expensive thing in the business. A supplier wants an NDA signed. A customer has sent back the MSA with tracked changes. An employee has asked about their notice period. A landlord’s agent has written about a rent review. Individually, twenty minutes. Collectively, the reason the founder is answering email at eleven at night and has not thought about the next twelve months in a fortnight. Triage means each item gets a decision the day it arrives: handled here, routed to a specialist, or escalated to you with the options already set out and a recommendation attached. The weekly summary is one page. Anything needing your decision is on it; anything that does not is simply closed.
Board and banking
Board packs, minutes, filings, banking and facility documentation, insurance renewals and the register of who agreed what. This is the administration that has no natural owner in a business below a certain size. The company secretary role does not exist, the finance function is focused on management accounts, and so filings slip, minutes are written retrospectively, and the option pool is tracked in a spreadsheet that diverges from the register. It matters at exactly two moments, and both of them are expensive. The first is a funding round, where a week of diligence turns into a month because the cap table does not reconcile and three years of board consents were never documented. The second is a sale, where the same problem recurs with a price adjustment attached. Keeping it current costs very little; reconstructing it under time pressure costs a great deal and happens at the worst possible moment. Insurance is in this block for the same reason. Renewals are treated as a price exercise when the question that matters is whether the cover still matches what the business now does, which is rarely the case two years after the policy was first written.
The awkward call
The supplier, the landlord, the shareholder, the departing employee. Made by us, with the objective agreed first. Most founders are capable of having these conversations. The reason they do not is that the relationship costs something and there is no way to have the conversation without spending it. A founder who tells a supplier their invoice is wrong has changed the relationship. Somebody acting for the founder who says the same thing has not, and the founder keeps the option of being reasonable afterwards. That is the real mechanism, and it is why the objective is agreed before the call rather than after. Are we trying to recover money, change behaviour, or exit the relationship cleanly. Each points to a different call, and the most common error is making the third call while intending the second. It is also why these conversations work better held by somebody who will still be there next quarter. A one-off intervention by an outside adviser is a threat. A standing function that has spoken to the same supplier three times is a relationship, and it gets more done.
The first month
What actually comes off the desk at the start is fairly consistent. A contract register built from whatever exists, which is usually a shared drive and somebody’s memory, with the renewal and break dates diarised and owned. The legal inbox redirected and triaged. The corporate record brought current: filings, registers, consents, the cap table reconciled to the statutory books. Insurance and banking documentation gathered into one place. The three or four live matters that have been drifting picked up and either closed or given a next step with a date. None of it is complicated. All of it is the sort of work that never reaches the top of a founder’s list, which is precisely why it accumulates until something breaks.
Where the boundary sits
Dinmore Bell coordinates rather than replaces the regulated professions. Tax advice and filing positions come from the business’s accountants. Insolvency advice comes from a licensed insolvency practitioner. Litigation, property transfers, immigration and licensing applications are conducted by instructed specialists. What the Founder Office adds is the thing those advisers cannot supply individually: somebody who holds the whole picture, knows which of them to instruct and when, briefs them properly so the first hour is not spent on background, and makes sure the answer comes back and is acted on. Most founders already have good advisers. What they do not have is anybody whose job is to run them.
Where specialists come in
Regulated advice — tax, insolvency, regulatory licensing, immigration — is provided by instructed specialists under our coordination.
Related results
All results →Sectors we run this for
Related insights
All insights →What a fully loaded General Counsel actually costs
The comparison is not our fee against an hourly rate. It is our fee against the hire you would otherwise make.
Where nine per cent of your revenue goes
Contract value rarely leaks in a single expensive event. It leaks quietly, through renewal dates nobody owns.
- How is a Founder Office different from a chief of staff?
- A chief of staff is an employee who runs the founder’s priorities across the whole business, including strategy and people. A Founder Office is a retained external function covering the legal, commercial and corporate administration specifically, with the professional judgement and specialist network attached. Businesses of a certain size sensibly have both.
- What size of business does this suit?
- Typically thirty to six hundred people, founder-led, with no in-house legal function and no company secretary. Below that the volume rarely justifies it. Above it, the usual answer is a first legal hire supported by the same function rather than replaced by it.
- Do you replace our existing accountants and solicitors?
- No. The function coordinates them and instructs them properly, which usually reduces what they are asked to do rather than increasing it. Most founders find their legal spend falls, because the work that reaches a solicitor arrives already scoped instead of as an open question.
- How quickly does the founder actually feel the difference?
- The inbox usually within a fortnight, because triage starts immediately. The corporate record takes four to eight weeks depending on how far behind it has drifted. The awkward calls can start in week one and are often the thing founders hand over first.
- What happens when something urgent lands out of hours?
- Escalation routes are agreed at the start and the function is reachable rather than ticketed. In practice the number of genuine out-of-hours matters falls once things are being handled during hours, because most emergencies are ordinary items that were left too long.
- Will you sign things on our behalf?
- Signing authority stays with the company’s directors. The function prepares, negotiates and recommends, and where a limited written authority is useful for routine documents such as NDAs it is agreed explicitly with defined boundaries rather than assumed.
- How is it priced?
- A fixed monthly retainer scoped to the actual load before it starts, so the cost is predictable and the founder is not deciding whether a question is worth asking. Defined projects outside the running function are scoped separately.
- What if we hire in-house later?
- That is a normal outcome and the function is built to hand over. The register, the corporate record, the contract templates and the matter history transfer to the new hire, who starts with an organised function rather than a shared drive. Many businesses keep a reduced retainer alongside for the specialist and corridor work.