Home / Private advisor for founders
Private counsel for founders

The conversation you cannot have elsewhere.

Independent counsel for founders carrying decisions that are strategic on the surface—and personal, existential or relational underneath.

Beyond ordinary advice

When the decision and the person deciding cannot be separated.

A founder can buy excellent technical advice. Lawyers, investors, board members and consultants can clarify what is possible. They cannot necessarily answer what is yours to do—or who you will become when you do it.

Northstar offers a confidential, independent place to think when almost everyone around you has a relationship to the outcome. The work may begin with an exit, succession, conflict, loss of purpose, a new venture or a decision that will alter more than the business.

The presenting question is rarely the whole question.

This is not another performance framework. It is sustained attention to the person upon whom the decision depends: the ambitions, loyalties, fears, identities and unlived possibilities shaping the choice.

The territory

What brings founders to Northstar.

Exit and identity

When selling the company also means relinquishing the identity, community and organising purpose built around it.

Succession and legacy

When letting go, stewardship and the future of others become inseparable from the next decision.

Success and meaning

When achievement still works outwardly but no longer answers the deeper question inwardly.

A private beginning

One conversation. No constituency.

Meetings take place in Surrey and London, online in the UK and internationally, or elsewhere by arrangement. Discretion is assumed.

Begin a private conversation