Founder & principal
For twenty-five years 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.
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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 Strategy 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, TMT, 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 on to venture investing at WPP’s media-technology fund, 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.
Fortune 500, FTSE 100 and international businesses - across digital, payments, retail, consumer and technology.
Served at Lion Strategy and at Hambalt, the predecessor firm Elliot founded in 2002.
Deal rooms as commercial-diligence adviser or representing a business in the room - focused on mid-market funds.
Buy-side and sell-side mandates across UK and international funds.
Capital-allocation and investment programmes with sovereign wealth funds, global masterplanning and engineering firms.
Across Europe, Latin America and MENA.
Own capital
Personal capital deployed since 2017, through two full market drawdowns, with Ethereum the longest-held position - alongside early-stage positions in AI and social prediction markets, taken across digital angel portals. First-hand experience across 30+ exchanges, decentralised exchanges, blockchains and payment rails, learned the hard way rather than from a distance.
A working read on the macro and market events that reprice these assets - liquidity, rates, geopolitics and policy - and what they mean for the businesses exposed to them. Alongside working knowledge of MiCA, the GENIUS and CLARITY Acts and the FCA digital-asset regime; legal opinions left to qualified counsel.
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.
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