Most mandates reach us after a first and a second option have been tried.
Third Option is brought in by boards, owners and state institutions when a business has to be refocused, a complex mandate carried through, or a crisis contained — and when the outcome depends as much on who will take the call as on what the analysis says.
Three lines of work. Most mandates draw on more than one.
Corporate consultancy
Advisory to owners, boards and investment committees on decisions that cannot be delegated: structure, capital, governance, market entry, and the positioning of a business with the institutions that govern it.
Operating and governance review · Ownership and holding structure · Capital raising and partner selection · Market entry and licensing · Regulatory and government engagement · Transaction and counterparty assessment
Refocusing
Work with businesses that have drifted, grown into the wrong shape, or stalled after a transaction. We establish what the company is actually good at, remove what is consuming it, and put the remaining business back under control.
Turnaround and stabilisation · Portfolio and subsidiary rationalisation · Post-transaction integration · Executive and board composition · Exit from unrecoverable positions · Operating plan and reporting discipline
Crisis management
Command and containment when a situation is moving faster than the organisation can govern it. We take the mandate, run it from the centre, and hand back a company that is in control of its own position.
Incident command and decision rhythm · Regulatory, prosecutorial and government exposure · Contested shareholder and partner situations · Fraud, integrity and security incidents · Stakeholder and communications sequencing · Recovery and remediation
The first option is usually the internal team. The second is usually a large firm.
Both are the right answer to most problems, and we say so. The mandates that reach us are the residue: the ones where the internal team is too close to the matter, and where a conventional advisory process has produced a defensible document without changing the position.
By the time a matter arrives here it tends to have three characteristics. It is time-critical. It turns on people rather than on analysis — on who is exposed, who is reliable, and who can be persuaded. And it cannot be resolved by anyone the parties would regard as an interested party.
We take the mandate on that basis: a small senior team, direct instruction from the principal, and a written position rather than a presentation.
HTI‑ITP — the assurance capability behind the practice.
When a mandate turns on people, we do not outsource that part.
HTI‑ITP is our own capability, built because the consultancy work kept requiring it. HTI — human threat intelligence — is the assessment side: who holds access, who can be relied upon, and what open and human sources show over time. ITP — the insider threat programme — is the standing side: the policy, monitoring, escalation path and the client's own people who run it afterwards.
In a consultancy mandate it answers the question behind the numbers: whether the management team is the one to back, whether a counterparty is what it presents itself as, whether the loss is theft. In a crisis it establishes, quickly and quietly, what actually happened and who was involved.
- Executive, counterparty and partner assessment
- Behavioural and psycholinguistic analysis
- Open-source and human-source enquiry
- Association, exposure and reliability mapping
- Structured interviewing in contested matters
- Source grading and confidence on every finding
- Policy, thresholds and escalation authority
- Vetting at appointment and on a continuing basis
- Behavioural analytics over existing systems
- Case handling and disciplinary defensibility
- Integration with controls the client already owns
- Handover, training and periodic review
Cyber security enters here and only here. A technical estate is usually where a human problem is discovered and rarely where it begins; we work with the client's existing security function, and bring in specialist technical capability — forensics, incident response — under our own supervision when a matter requires it. Programmes run inside the client's environment, under the client's control, against the standards it already reports on.
We work where we are known, and we are known in a small number of places.
South Africa and the neighbouring states are our footing, with established work in Europe and the Middle East. In these markets the formal process is seldom the whole process. Sequencing decides outcomes: who is told what, in which order, and by whom. Knowing which door to use — and which not to — is frequently the entire mandate.
Much of what we do rests on relationships built over many years across government, regulators, institutional investors and the professions. They are not a service line and they are not for sale; they are the reason a matter can be raised early, at the level where it can still be dealt with quietly.
We publish no client names, no case studies and no endorsements, and we do not discuss one client with another. A reference, where one is wanted, is given privately by someone who agreed to give it. We are small on purpose, take a limited number of mandates at a time, and decline work we cannot do well, discreetly or lawfully.
From first conversation to a mandate under way, in weeks.
Conversation
We listen, then set out in writing the problem as we understand it. No proposal and no cost at this stage. If we are the wrong firm, or the second option is still the right one, we say so here.
Position
Two to four weeks. What is actually the matter, who is exposed, what can be recovered, and what the organisation can realistically carry out. Delivered as a written position with a recommended course.
Mandate
We execute alongside the principal — sequencing the approach, running the room where required, and installing whatever assurance the matter needs. Reporting is to one person, not a committee.
Handover
The client's own people carry it forward. We review periodically and remain reachable. A business that still depends on us has not been refocused.
Enquiries are handled personally.
A short note about the nature of the matter is enough to begin.
Please send nothing sensitive by email. Where a matter requires it we will arrange a secure channel, or meet.