Sapphire & Steel is a deeptech scaleup advisory. We work with boards, executive teams and all-hands to cut a path to industry scale.
SCALE STRATEGY
We work with management teams and boards to elevate ambition, scrutinise competitive positioning and plot the most resource efficient and decisive route to scale.
COMMERCIAL LEADERSHIP
We develop the commercial confidence of brilliant science and engineering leaders. We go with them deep into their markets and across the value chain to drive industry change.
GOVERNANCE & PERFORMANCE
We work inside the business, top to bottom, to accelerate execution. Setting business performance targets, critical path plans and whole business accountability to deliver.
TESTIMONIAL
CEO, UK engineering scaleup
“Working with Anna-Lisa and Pete over the last 2.5 years has been a genuinely special partnership. They came into the business at a time when we were scaling quickly and needed to build a leadership team that could operate at a much higher level together.
The offsites they ran with us were completely brilliant - genuinely the best I’ve ever been part of by a mile. They create a space that is safe enough for people to be honest and open, but demanding enough that everyone leaves having stepped up.
What they bring is a rare combination of clear thinking, emotional intelligence and practical leadership experience. They’ve pushed me to think differently about how I show up as CEO and emboldened my confidence in my leadership style to build the culture we want by design and effort and not by chance.
Their work has strengthened our leadership team, sharpened our thinking, and left the company in a stronger place to execute the next phase.
Working with them has been a joy, and the business is stronger for all of our employees because they were part of the journey.”
DOING REALLY HARD THINGS
Our philosophy
Scaling a deeptech business is extraordinarily hard. We’ve built a philosophy for our own partnership that resonates with founders.
These last 8 years we have developed a lot of assets and done some extraordinary commercial work, making relationships with smart leaders across the ecosystem. At the centre of that is our partnership.
This didn’t come easy. We’ve seen some eye-opening things 👀 and we learn by our own mistakes every day 😡. Every one of those experiences is put into the machine (🧠🧠), made sense of, decoded and shared back to the businesses we work with. Always learning.
It’s this partnership that has built trust for us to engage with boards and customers on behalf of founders, drive commercial delivery and governance with management teams, and get the keys to the real engine of growth - the all hands. 🤜🤛
Our partnership is a living culture, a petri-dish 🧫, to examine the impact of behaviour, starting with our own. Our customers use us to understand themselves, their team, their board and their market.
It’s a tricky USP to capture in a couple of words - though with retrospect we realise it was there all the time.
It’s Sapphire & Steel.