A private limited company doing business strategy, technology infusion, staff augmentation and investment facilitation — with the people to see the work through.
Allan Ventures is a business strategy company. The distinguishing part is not the strategy — it is that we are set up to still be there when the strategy meets the business. We have our own team, and partners we bring in where a piece of work needs a specialist we do not employ.
Our bias is technology. Most of the businesses we work with are not short of ideas; they are short of the systems, the reporting and the capacity to act on them. So a typical engagement moves quickly from what should happen to what has to be installed, measured, funded or staffed for it to happen.
Every engagement has someone accountable for it who is in the business regularly, not a name on a proposal. Depending on the work, that person is joined by specialists from our own team or, where a piece of work needs expertise we do not employ, by partners we have worked with before. In staff augmentation, by people who sit inside your team and report into your management for the duration.
That is what makes it possible to stay past the recommendation rather than hand over a document and leave.
We facilitate capital raising, which means there are situations where we stand to earn from a decision we are also advising on. Pretending that is not a conflict would be worth less than saying it plainly.
So: where a client is considering raising capital, our interest in that raise is disclosed before the question of whether to raise at all is discussed. Where we would earn from implementing our own recommendation, we say so at the point of recommending it, and we are happy to be compared against others. And where we are not the right people, we say that too — it costs us one engagement and saves the relationship.
We do not invest our own money in client businesses. We facilitate investment — preparing a business to be funded and introducing it to debt and equity investors — which is a different thing, and it is worth being precise about the difference.
A business past the point of being run out of one person's head, with revenue that repeats, a team, and a change it knows it needs to make but cannot make while also trading.
Pre-revenue, or looking for a document rather than a change. If what you need is a plan you can take to a board, that is a shorter and cheaper piece of work than the one we are set up for — and we will tell you.
Tell us what is in the way and we will tell you whether we are the right people.