Early in my career, I made a promise to investors I shouldn't have made — not because the ambition was wrong, but because I hadn't thought hard enough about what stood between the commitment and the delivery. Manufacturing limitations. Design cycles. Homologation timelines. I missed my sales targets by two years. Two years in a startup is an eternity. That mistake cost the company, cost my investors, and cost me. I never made it again.

​

That experience is why I do what I do now.

 

I've spent the last decade building things in cleantech — not advising on them, not modelling them in spreadsheets, but actually building them. I was CEO of a wind turbine manufacturer where we captured half the Russian market and closed a $900M sales agreement. I was CEO and Chairman of a lithium-ion cell and pack manufacturer, where I led the acquisition of a Korean cell maker and oversaw the construction of an 8 GWh gigafactory. Before that, I ran business development for a 2 GW power generation company and turned it from loss to profit.

​

Every strategy I designed, I also had to execute. Every commitment I made to investors and boards, I had to deliver on — or face the consequences personally. That's not a common background in the consulting world. Most advisors are never accountable for the advice they give. I was.

 

The moment I decided to shift from operating to advising came when a founder showed me a carbon-fibre car body he'd built. It was genuinely impressive engineering. But he had no idea how to scale it — no manufacturing plan, no supply chain thinking, no path from prototype to commercial production. I've met that founder in many forms since. Brilliant engineers and scientists with technologies that could genuinely matter, who will never get them to market without someone in the room who has navigated that gap before.

 

That's the gap I work in.

 

I help cleantech founders and investors navigate FOAK — First-of-a-Kind — projects: the brutal, expensive, high-stakes phase between a working pilot and a factory that actually delivers. I work on strategy, financing, offtake agreements, team building, supply chains, and the hundred other things that break between the lab and commercial scale. I'm a generalist by design, because FOAK problems don't respect functional boundaries.

I won't tell you what to do and disappear. I've been in the room where the decisions get made, and I know what it costs when they go wrong.

​

The things people assume will be easy are almost always the ones that break them. My job is to make sure you've thought about those things before they break you.