Ready for capital — before capital looks at you.

When the readiness clock has already started.

• A raise, refinance, acquisition or exit is plausible within the next 6–24 months.
• The numbers exist, but you wouldn't enjoy defending them line-by-line in diligence.
• Governance is honest but informal — and diligence punishes informality.
• The equity story lives in the founder's head rather than on paper investors can test.
• A previous process stalled, dragged or repriced — and you'd rather the next one didn't.

Diligence is a search for reasons to reprice. Every gap it finds — messy management information, undocumented decisions, a board that exists mostly on paper — becomes leverage on the other side of the table. Readiness work systematically removes that leverage before anyone sees the data room.

The programme runs at board level because that's where buyers look first: how decisions are made, recorded and reviewed tells an investor more than any forecast. Max brings the company side of the table — CEO of a £10m+ design and manufacturing group by 27 — together with investment-side experience across a social-enterprise investment fund (Create Equity) and the digital-asset research world, where he serves as Advisory Chair of Unsigned Research.

Readiness work pairs naturally with chairing through the deal period itself: the programme builds the machine; the chair keeps it credible under fire.