Advisor Guide: What A Good Scale-Up Advisor Actually Does

What do scale-up advisors actually do?

Advisor is the probably most loosely-used word in the world of founders and early-stage business. Everybody is somebody’s advisor and half of the people on LinkedIn seem to be too. The variance in what the role actually delivers and what it’s actually worth paying for is enormous.

This guide is the version of the story I wish more founders had before they started hiring advisors. What the role is really for, when it’s the right tool, what a good advisor actually does in the room and how to tell the difference between an advisor who’s useful and one who’s not.

I’m writing this as someone who has sat on both sides of the table. I’ve been an operator for 26 years – founder, MD and COO of scaling technology businesses, including leading a digital agency we sold to a UK listed holdco and then sitting on the exec team of that group as it grew from £31.5m to £83m in revenue. I’ve served as a non-executive director on multiple growth-company boards and I currently advise founders and CEOs of scale-ups as a trusted external operator. So when I talk about what a good advisor does, I’m describing the work I do every month and the work I’ve watched other advisors do well (and badly) for years.

What an advisor is (and what they aren’t)

An advisor is an experienced operator who sits outside your business and gives you counsel – usually in a regular monthly or six-weekly rhythm – on the decisions that are too big to get wrong.

The advisor’s job isn’t to do the work. Their job is to help you see the work more clearly, so the decisions you make about it are better ones. A good advisor is a pattern-matcher, a sounding board, a challenger and – when the founder needs it most – a steadying voice in the middle of a hard week.

That’s what they are. What they aren’t:

Not a consultant. A consultant is hired to produce a recommendation or execute a specific piece of work. An advisor is hired for judgement over time. The unit of value is the quality of the conversation, not a deliverable.

Not necessarily a board member. Board members carry fiduciary responsibility and legal exposure. Advisors carry neither. The relationship is more informal, more flexible and often more honest – because an advisor can push you in ways a board director is constrained from pushing.

Not a coach. A coach works on the founder while an advisor works on the decisions in front of the founder. The two roles overlap at the edges – most good advisors coach a little, most good founder coaches advise a little – but the centres of gravity are different.

Not a fractional exec. A fractional COO or CMO or CTO is inside the business doing the job. An advisor stays outside the business, helping you think about the job.

When a founder actually needs an advisor

Four patterns show up again and again in the conversations that become advisor engagements.

You’re lonely at the top. Not in the sad-founder-on-LinkedIn sense but in the practical sense: there’s nobody inside the business who can hear every part of the problem you’re carrying, because it involves them. The leadership team you’re talking to is part of the thing you’re thinking about. You need a peer-level operator outside the business who can hold the whole picture with you.
Big, infrequent decisions are coming up. A fundraise. An acquisition. A CEO transition. A major market move. The sorts of decisions where the cost of getting them wrong is permanent and where your own pattern library has no precedent for what good looks like. I’ve been through a number of these as an operator – selling an agency, integrating acquired companies, facilitating the leadership transition from founders to an incoming CEO and CFO at TPXimpact – and the single biggest thing that changes the quality of those decisions is having someone in the room who has lived the shape of them before.
You’ve hit the ceiling of your own judgement in a domain. Not every founder is equally experienced at every function. You might be an exceptional product operator who hasn’t yet built a senior commercial team or a brilliant commercial mind who doesn’t have an instinct for operations. An advisor with deep knowledge in that specific gap can lift your decision quality right away.
You need somebody to disagree with you. Scaling founders gradually lose access to honest disagreement. The team reports to you. The board is pleasant. Investors are bullish because they’re investors. An advisor is person who gives you structured disagreement in your calendar – the person whose job is to push on your thinking before the decision is made.

“Simon has often been my go to person to talk to about gnarly problems in technology businesses. We’ve often brainstormed ideas around operating models and structures, and I’ve really valued Simon’s approach as a leader, which is about integrity, inclusivity, and being a servant to his colleagues. If you need help with leadership, business models, or people challenges, you’ll be in very safe hands.”

Stuart Arthur, Founder & CTO, Pivotl

What a good advisor actually does

The work of an advisor is mostly the work of conversations and most of what happens in those conversations is invisible from the outside. Here’s what it actually looks like from inside the relationship.

Reading the board pack before you see it. A good advisor takes the time to understand what’s going on in your business in between sessions, not just in them. That means reading the numbers, noticing what’s shifting and coming to the conversation with an informed view rather than a blank page.

Asking the question nobody else will. Most of the conversations a founder has about their own business are filtered – by the team’s stake in the answer, by the board’s ownership or by the investor’s agenda. An advisor’s job is to be the person who can ask the uncomfortable question because they have nothing to lose by asking it.

Pattern-matching across businesses they’ve seen. The value of an experienced advisor isn’t that they’ve seen the exact situation you’re in – it’s that they’ve seen the shape of it in five other businesses and can tell you how it usually plays out. “This reminds me of a business where…” is something I say a lot and its worth its weight when the decision in front of you is expensive. My own pattern library runs from a listed group at £83m through M&A integrations and exits through to early-stage tech founders finding their operating rhythm for the first time.

Slowing you down when you should slow down. Founders under pressure tend to accelerate. An advisor’s job is sometimes to put a hand on the wheel and say “let’s not decide this today.” The decisions you regret later are almost never the ones you slept on. They’re the ones you forced through.

Speeding you up when you should speed up. The opposite is also true. Sometimes a founder has been mulling a decision for three months because the weight of it is too heavy to pick up alone. An advisor gives them the permission and the cover to make the call and move on.

Being available between sessions. The scheduled conversations are the rhythm but founders I work with the value often shows up in the unscheduled ones – something like a quick WhatsApp message on a Tuesday morning: “we’ve just had a senior resignation – how do I think about rescuing it?” A good advisor gets back to you before the end of the day with something useful, because the value of the counsel grows when it’s available at the moment of the decision.

What an advisor engagement looks like in practice

Every advisor works slightly differently, but most good engagements have a similar shape.

A monthly main session. Typically a 60 or 90 minute board or exec team meeting for accountability and working through the issues that are actively in front of you. I prepare by reading the numbers, the board pack and anything you’ve shared in advance, so the first fifteen minutes aren’t me being briefed – they’re us getting to work.

Follow-up discussions and agreed actions. After each main session, we have a clear set of things we’ve decided and our quick chats or check-ins help drive change between sessions.

Access between sessions. That means emails, Slack, WhatsApp and occasional unscheduled calls. Bounded by reasonableness but not limited. I believe the whole point of an advisor is to be there when the judgement is needed not only when it’s scheduled.

Occasional attendance at key moments. Some advisor relationships include sitting in on specific board meetings, leadership offsites or particularly consequential conversations when it’s useful. I’m not as a participant in the running of the business, but I am a second set of eyes in the room at the moments where the stakes are highest.

A periodic review of the relationship. Step back from the week-to-week and look at whether it’s still producing the right kind of value, whether the questions have shifted and whether the cadence is right. Advisor engagements tend to die quietly when nobody audits them.

“Simon has an outstanding skill set and extensive experience in technology, business operations and management. He is easy to work with and can effectively draw on his skills and experience to help solve problems with calm authority and creativity. I highly recommend Simon to anyone looking for efficient, energetic and effective support.”

Neil Benson, serial biotech founder at Xenologiq, Quantlmed & Sevenless Therapeutics

How to spot a good advisor

Here are five things I’d look for before signing any advisor relationship:

Operator experience, not just advisor experience. Somebody whose entire career has been advising is a much weaker signal than somebody who has run the kind of business you’re running and is now advising from that base. The advisors who have only ever advised have a suspicious absence of scars from exposure to real challenges.

Specific preparation. The best advisors arrive with a question that makes it clear they’ve actually thought about your business in the week before. The weakest ones arrive blank and ask the founder to bring them up to speed. If the first fifteen minutes of every session is briefing rather than advising, I think you’re probably paying for the wrong thing.

Willingness to say “I don’t know.” A good advisor is clear about the edges of their own competence. If the question you’re wrestling with is outside the advisor’s pattern library, they should say so and ideally point you to the person in their network who does know. The advisors who pretend to have answers in every domain are the ones who quietly do the most damage.

Portfolio discipline. How many founders are they advising at once? If the answer is 15, you’re getting a tiny slice of their attention. A good advisor caps the number of live founder relationships they’ll have at any particular time so that each founder gets the depth of attention the work actually needs. Ask the question directly – the answer tells you a lot about their approach as an advisor.

A clear view of when the relationship should end. Some advisor relationships should run for years. Some should run for twelve months and then wind up. A good advisor is willing to name the conditions under which they’d advise you to end the engagement – for example because the relationship has done its job or because the business has moved into a phase where a different advisor would serve you better.

When an advisor isn’t what you need

And an advisor isn’t always the right answer. Here are three situations where the right answer is something other than an advisor:

When the problem is execution, not judgement. If the thing that’s breaking is that the business can’t ship what it’s decided, an advisor is maybe the wrong intervention. You need somebody inside the business making it happen – fractional, interim or a full-time hire. An advisor can help you see why the execution is broken, but they can’t fix it from outside.

When the problem is you. If what’s holding the business back is the founder’s own development – for example how you lead, how you think, how you handle pressure, how you relate to the team – an advisor can maybe help a little with that, but a coach can work on it directly. Don’t make an advisor do the coach’s job (unless they’re a qualified coach as well as an advisor).

When what you actually want is validation. If you’re hiring an advisor because you want somebody to tell you that you’re right about the decision you’ve already made, the engagement will produce nothing useful and cost you money. Don’t bother. A good advisor’s job is to test your thinking, not to ratify it. If you’re not ready for the test wait until you are.

What it costs

Advisor fees vary more than any other kind of operator engagement because the role is so loosely defined. For an experienced operator-advisor working with a UK scale-up, monthly retainers typically sit in the £750 to £1,500 range depending on the cadence and the depth of involvement.

Some advisor relationships are paid purely in equity – typically 0.25% to 1% of the business over a two-year vest, depending on the stage and the depth of involvement. Equity-only arrangements work best when the advisor is bringing something quite specific (customer introductions, fundraising networks, domain credibility) rather than general judgement.

Hybrid retainer-plus-equity is common where the founder wants cash to flow but also wants the advisor to have genuine skin in the game over the long term. I tend to work on fees or a mix of fees and equity – not solely equity.

The cost question actually matters less than the value question as long as there’s enough free cashflow. The right advisor relationship can shift the quality of decisions by a noticeable margin for years which is usually worth many multiples of the fee. The wrong advisor relationship is expensive at any price because you end up making worse decisions while feeling more confident about them.

How I work as an advisor

I advise founders and CEOs of £1m–£15m UK and US scale-ups – typically tech-centric businesses, agencies, SaaS and professional services firms with 10 to 125 people. The rhythm is usually a monthly board or exec team meeting plus access between sessions for the things that can’t wait. I cap the number of founders I work with at any given time so that each relationship gets real attention. I expect to know your business well enough to bring a view to the room, not to arrive as a blank page.

Alongside my independent advisory work, I hold non-executive director roles on the boards of growth companies including thinkTRIBE and Extra Brain and I chair the audit and risk committee of a national charity. That mix of sitting on boards and advising founders from outside the boardroom gives me a useful view of the full range of governance and advisory relationships. I find it sharpens my judgement about which shape is actually right for a given founder.

I work best with founders who are carrying the weight of big operational decisions and want a peer-level operator in the room who has lived through the shape of what they’re facing. If the problem is fundamentally one of execution rather than judgement, I’ll say so in the first conversation and point you at the right answer – which may or may not be me.

Our first conversation is free and diagnostic-focussed. My goal is to be honest about whether an advisor engagement is actually the right shape for the problem in front of you, not to sell you one regardless.

The advisor guide: what a good scale-up advisor actually does