I help founders when the system breaks.
Your product works. Your company has traction. And somewhere in the last year, getting things done got harder than it should be.
The leadership meeting decides nothing. The plan everyone agreed to isn’t being executed. You and your co-founder have stopped saying what you actually think. A senior hire isn’t landing and you’re not sure if it’s them or the company. Everyone is working harder for less, and you can feel the team feeling it.
You’ve probably already tried the obvious fixes. A new framework. A new VP. A strategy offsite. They helped for a month.
That’s because the problem isn’t any one of those things. It’s the system they sit in. Twenty visible problems usually trace back to three root causes, and those three are almost always about people, decisions, and trust, not product or technology.
I find the three. Then I stay and help you fix them.
If you’re the one who sees it
Maybe you’re not the founder. You’re the one who runs the operation, holds the team together, and watches the founders circle the same three decisions for months without landing any of them. You’ve tried raising it, carefully and then less carefully. It comes out as criticism, or it gets heard as politics, and nothing moves. Meanwhile the best people on the team are starting to look around.
You’re not wrong. And you’re not the right person to fix it, because you’re inside it. I’m the outside person the founders will actually listen to. I come in neutral, build trust fast with everyone in the room, and help the founders see what you’ve been seeing, in a way they can act on. Then I stay and help drive the change, with you.
Who I work with
Founder-led companies, roughly 20 to 150 people, past product-market fit, where the thing in the way is no longer the product. It’s the way the company makes decisions, the way the founders work together, and the organizational debt that built up while everyone was busy winning.
I work with founders who want the partnership to survive the company, and the company to survive the partnership. If you want someone to win the argument with your co-founder for you, I’m the wrong call.
How it works
See the System
Thirty days, embedded. I talk to everyone, sit in the meetings that matter, and map how the company actually works: where decisions get made, where they stall, and why. You get the three root causes behind the twenty symptoms, the decisions that are stuck, and a plan to unstick them. You also get a clear definition, in your words, of what fixed looks like.
Unlock the Decisions
The hard ones. The reorg that feels impossible. The leader who’s in the wrong seat. The co-founder conversation you’ve been avoiding for a year. I don’t hand you a recommendation and leave. I’m in the room while you make the call, and I help you make it executable.
Drive the Change
Hands on, with you, for three, six, or nine months. People in the wrong roles get moved. The operating rhythm gets installed and actually used. The scorecard becomes the thing the whole company looks at. I stay through the hardest phase, and I’m designed to leave once your leadership team runs the system without me.
Change happens through the founders, not around them. That’s not a limitation, it’s the method.
What this is not
I’m not a firm. No team of analysts, no 200-page deck, no recommendations presented from the front of the room to people who will never see me again. One person, embedded, adjusting the diagnosis daily as reality surfaces, in the room for the conversations that decide whether the company makes it. No deck. Decisions made and executed.
A recent engagement
A ten-year-old adtech security company, about fifty people, two co-founders who had built something real and had stopped trusting each other. Decisions stalled at the top. Strategy lived in two different heads. The leadership team was senior but not yet a team.
Within a month we had a diagnosis. Over the following eighteen months: a co-founder working agreement the founders wrote together, a five-metric scorecard the whole company sees every month, a financial model that put breakeven on a date instead of a hope, a leadership team rebuilt around clear seats and reporting lines, a shared strategic thesis now being taught company-wide, and a go-to-market plan the founders own rather than tolerate. The founders describe me today as their Integrator. I’d describe it as two people who can work together again, running a company that can execute.
[PLACEHOLDER] “Bernardo came in as a consultant and became the person I trust to tell me what I can’t see. He gave my co-founder and me a way to work together again, and he built the scorecard the whole company runs on now.”
CEO and co-founder
Who I am
Twenty years building and leading technology companies: engineer, product leader, VP of Engineering, CTO. A decade as CTO across a multi-brand software group. A certified mediator. I read organizational and emotional systems the way I used to read code, and I’ve spent the last several years doing one thing: parachuting into founder-led companies with brilliant products and broken partnerships, and helping them work again.
Fanti Company Consulting 