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founderEDGE

The stakes are high—and relationships matter. We help build enduring bridges between founders, investors, and successors to accelerate growth and value creation.

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Investors + Founders: Lead, Scale, Succeed

Scaling founder-led companies presents extraordinary opportunities for growth and impact. Founders bring vision, energy, and conviction to will ‘unicorns’ into existence; yet these same qualities require intentional evolution as their ventures attract investment or new shareholders.

How we partner with you

We help founders and investors navigate pivotal moments together. By anticipating and addressing the typical growing pains, we help you stay ahead of obstacles that could derail momentum. Whether it’s clarifying roles and strategy alignment, accelerating leadership team development, or planning thoughtful founder transitions, we work alongside you to put in place the guardrails for exponential growth. We stand in your corner, aligning founder vision and investor expertise to drive exceptional outcomes.

As a founder-led firm, ghSMART brings 30 years of trusted perspective advising founder-led companies, both private equity-backed and publicly-facing, and a deep, data-driven understanding of what it takes to scale founder-led businesses.

What you can expect

Harnessing your founderEDGE means unlocking the leadership required to scale founder-led ecosystems.

Exploration. Discovering what motivates and distinguishes the founder, assessing organizational strengths and opportunities, and diagnosing the ecosystem’s readiness to scale—laying the foundation for aligned, high-impact growth.

Founder Assessment – Deep dive on the company’s inception story, the founder’s motivations, and the founder’s superpowers and blindspots
Ecosystem Diligence – Insight gathering to set up the founder and investor for success post-close, identifying any areas of discord early

Dialogue. Facilitating critical alignment across founders, investors, and successors through structured conversations, shared goals, and ongoing check-ins—ensuring clarity on roles, expectations, and the path forward.

Partnership Alignment for Investor & Founder teams, potential successors – Scorecarding, ways of working, commitment planning, conversation cadence

Growth. Supporting founders and their teams in scaling leadership, building strong management systems, and planning for transitions—equipping the organization to evolve, grow, and sustain value beyond the founder.

Scaling Self – Founder advisory and development, team bench building, succession planning
Scaling Team – Top Team Effectiveness, bridging founder and manager modes

Engagement. Offering spaces for shared learning through customized workshops, peer problem-solving and communities, research-backed discussions, and candid dialogue—bringing founders and investors together to explore challenges, share insights, and strengthen founder-led partnerships.

Customized learning sessions – Working sessions, ghSMART network peer learning, access to proprietary research and thought leadership

Through deep discovery, candid dialogue, targeted growth support, and shared learning, founders, investors, and successors are empowered to lead with clarity and drive enduring value.

"I had a need to scale the executive team at MiQ....ghSMART was a really good, independent voice that helped me aggregate what the board was telling me, what my instincts were, but having a third party there that you trusted to give you a different viewpoint. It helped me ultimately make the right decisions in building the senior team but more importantly, it really helped the individuals on that team."

Gurman Hundal
Co-Founder, MiQ

Case study

Challenge

A charismatic founder CEO of a ~$75MM ARR fast-growing technology company had an outsized presence in the market she helped pioneer. She retained majority ownership and voting rights on a board that consisted of a mix of venture capitalists and family offices. Sponsor was the first PE investor and took a minority stake. Most of the founder’s direct reports were first-time C-suite executives with capability gaps.

Solution

We invested up front in the founder, getting to know her story and her goals.
We aligned the investor and the founder on a Scorecard, which provided the objective-oriented details needed to define success.
The team conducted developmental assessments on the CEO and her direct reports.
The assessments were supplemented with an organizational diagnostic on team dynamic to identify critical capability gaps.
We helped the founder CEO see that her strengths around vision and market evangelism were critical to retain, and that her lack of passion for operational details would compromise the next phase of growth.

Impact

The founder CEO decided to hire a president to lead the executive team and give them the hands-on development they needed. This allowed her to elevate herself to focus on her highest and best use. She engaged ghSMART to support her in selecting this role.
The CEO felt equipped to have direct discussions with the leadership team about their development areas.
The CEO has since become an enthusiastic reference for the PE sponsor. With new target company CEOs, she has called the investment in ghSMART one of the top sources of value that come from partnering with this sponsor.

"The investment in ghSMART was one of the top sources of value that came with partnering with our Investor. I highly recommend you take advantage of this opportunity."

Founder & CEO

founderEDGE