would your business survive 30 days without you?

If your business turns over between £250k and £50 million a year, the honest answer is probably no. Even with a great team.

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book a 20 min discovery call to see if we’re the right fit.

in three parts

it didn't start that way.

Remember the beginning? Your first customer. Your first hire who just got it. Something that was yours, done your way.

That's how owning a business should feel.

Then it grew. And it grew around you.

The big decisions still wait for you. Things only get done right when you're in the room. You go on holiday and take the laptop. Because, well, you have to.

If you tried to sell it, the buyer would make you stay for years. Without you, the business isn't worth the multiple you're after.

People told you to work harder. To care more than everyone else. To find one person and hand it all to them. None of it worked, and now the business you own feels like a job you can't quit.

You're not being paid for owning the business. You're being paid for working in it.

That's the owner's tax.

the good stuff is still there.

The good stuff is still there. What you care about. What good looks like to you. The reason behind every yes and every no.

That's your code.

The problem is, it's all in your head.

So it needs to move. Not into another person. Into the business itself, so the business does things the way you would, even when you're not there.

That's how In-N-Out works. The founder set the standard in 1948 and has been gone for decades; his granddaughter runs it his way, and nobody has copied it, because it isn't a trick. It's who they are. It's how Richer Sounds works too. Julian Richer wrote his way of doing things down, handed most of the business to its staff, and it kept running his way.

Getting there means letting go. It's the hardest thing a founder ever does.

that's where lifestack comes in.

That's where lifestack comes in. Between us, we've done this inside more than thirty businesses, from ten people to tens of thousands.

We find what makes your business yours. We design it into the business, so it doesn't depend on you. Then we keep going until it runs, grows and sells without you.

The business stops needing you to run it, and you get paid for owning it.

That's the owner's dividend.

Thirty days without you.
That's the test.
And it's the whole point.

our founders.

not advisers looking in, but people who carried the results: founding, funding and exiting businesses, scaling teams, building the systems those businesses ran on, and taking organisations from depending on one person to running without them.

Steven Bianchi

Steven has sat in all three chairs: founder of six businesses; CPO, CIO and COO at some of Europe's best-known companies, from Unilever to Revolut; and chair, NED and board adviser. Along the way, two IPOs, 30-plus exits and around $3.5 billion raised. It taught him what buyers and investors pay for, and where value hides: in people, not the business. He works out what's living in the owner and the team that should be living in the business.

Claire Alvis

Claire has spent a decade inside businesses where the owner's judgement stops scaling: Deliveroo, Vita Mojo, and as COO of a cold-chain logistics scale-up. She has scaled business operations from ten people to a hundred to a thousand, and knows that an owner's standard rarely survives the trip on its own. She builds the systems that carry it, so what makes a business excellent lives in how it runs and outlasts any exit, including the owner's.