Founding Partner

Elliot Ronald.

For over two decades I have put numbers on markets that resist them - originating the work, leading the teams behind it, and presenting it in the room where the decision lands.

Lion is built on a simple promise: the senior adviser whose judgement you are buying is the one in the evidence, the model and the room - from the first conversation to the final recommendation.

I work closely with the people who carry the decision: founders and owner-managers raising capital or readying a business for sale; management teams and their investors testing a deal; CEOs and boards of listed companies setting growth strategy; sovereign institutions committing capital to projects measured in decades.

The shape of the help changes with the situation: proving a business is still investable in a downturn, articulating the value a buyer will actually pay for, finding growth the published numbers cannot see - or saying, carefully, that the right answer is no.

Much of our current work now concentrates where markets are being repriced fastest: AI and digital assets - markets I work in first-hand. I have built and run production AI agents in client work, and built a public tool to help people understand their exposure to AI. You can find my thoughts on the intelligence economy in the Thinking section. I also bring considerable experience of digital assets and the potential impact of tokenisation on the economy.

I founded Lion Strategy in 2017, and Hambalt before it in 2002 - steering clients through the 2009 crisis and out the other side, with formative years at OC&C Strategy Consultants in between that sharpened the commercial-diligence, digital, retail and consumer craft still running through the work. Over that time the work has spanned corporate strategy, commercial diligence, capital raises, sovereign investment and national economic programmes.

I started my career in the Strategic Advisory Services team at EY, went into TMT venture investing, and co-founded two start-ups - one of Europe’s first transactional mobile-commerce sites and a computer-vision software venture. At Oxford I read experimental psychology, so had the opportunity to study human cognition and artificial neural networks when they were a curiosity rather than an asset class.

Own capital

Invested through the cycle.

Book a 30-minute introductory call

Pick a time that suits you. We’ll talk through the decision you’re facing, work out whether I’m the right person for it, and agree sensible next steps. No pitch, no obligation. If we work together, it’s a fixed fee against an agreed scope.

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