Ready Ventures

Ready Ventures is a boutique management consultancy, and it invests. Both halves are run by the same small group of senior partners — people who have carried a P&L, shipped a product, or sat through the board meeting where the number was missed. There is no pyramid underneath us. That is the whole design.

Most consulting sells leverage. A partner wins the work, and the work is then done by people two decades younger, because that is the only way the economics function at scale. It is not a scandal; it is arithmetic. But it means the person who understood your problem in the first meeting is rarely the person holding the pen in month three.

Why it exists

Because what a founder or a board is usually short of is not capacity. It is judgement.

If the advice is any good, the people giving it should be willing to take it themselves.

That sentence is the test we apply to our own work. A recommendation that no one on our side would act on with their own money and their own reputation is not a recommendation — it is a deliverable. We have all received those, and some of us have written them.

How it is run

Small, deliberately. Engagements start with something short — a two-week diagnostic, a workshop, a second opinion on a decision already sitting on the table — and grow only when it is obviously worth it to the client. We have no licences to resell and no partner quotas to hit, which is what lets the advice stay genuinely platform agnostic.

We work remotely, but inside the client's week rather than at arm's length from it: in the standups, on the board, answering in their channel. The engineering, when a project needs building rather than deciding, has somewhere to go — Soltech has been that somewhere more than once.

Where it is going

Toward more of the investing. We back companies venture-style, sometimes ones we have advised and sometimes ones we simply believe in, and the two activities improve each other in a way I did not fully anticipate. Advising sharpens what you look for as an investor. Investing makes you honest about what advice is actually worth.

It also caps how fast this can grow, because both halves depend on partners who are hard to find and impossible to hire in volume. So far that has been the right constraint.