← Scale-ups Case study
Foundations before funding.
Data, technology and AI strategy for an emerging luxury hospitality group — set before the first supplier contract entrenched a silo, and before the first institutional investor asked the obvious question.
We are practitioners, not consultants. We have started dozens of companies, invested in hundreds of startups, sat on their boards, and helped governments write the policy that lets them exist in the first place.
A founder-led group being built around an established premium spirits brand, expanding into a luxury travel and hospitality ecosystem: aviation, hotels, villas, private clubs, and a membership programme spanning all of them.
UK-based, serving members across the UK, Europe and the US. The founders were preparing to raise institutional capital.
Suppliers were being engaged across marketing, rewards and booking — each one defaulting, as suppliers do, to holding customer data inside its own platform.
And investor conversations were under way that needed a defensible answer to the obvious question: what does this group own that an incumbent can't copy?
The honest answer was a single asset that didn't fully exist yet: one clean, consented member database following the same customer from the bottle to the boarding gate to the bar. Every week without a written standard made that asset harder to build, because every supplier contract signed without data terms creates a silo the group later has to buy back.
The member database is the business. A brand can be licensed and a route can be copied; a consented record of who members are, what they buy and where they travel cannot be rebuilt.— The engagement thesis
What we did
Three parallel workstreams, one operating standard.
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01
Data, Technology & AI Strategy
The group's foundational standard, written to be issued — not admired.
- Outright group ownership of all member data, in every jurisdiction of operation.
- Mandatory contract terms ready to issue to every supplier — write in, read out, via API — never copies, never ownership.
- Compliance positions across the UK, EU and US, current to the month of delivery.
- A costed software stack for the shared spine and each operating vertical, with named vendors and pricing models.
- A three-phase AI adoption roadmap, built for cost-conscious founders.
- Governance, security baseline, first hires, and a full risk register.
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02
Concept development
Restructured the founders' own concept into an investable framing.
- Staged operating models for the aviation proposition.
- Demand and membership logic across the group.
- Capital and risk framing suited to institutional readers.
- The validation questions a diligence process will ask — all aligned with the data standard.
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03
Investor positioning
A concise briefing on the AI-first advantage — and a visual teaser for the fundraise.
- The industry's structural cost problem, quantified.
- The upside of running AI-native from day one.
- Why incumbents carrying legacy stacks and staffing models can't follow.
- A visual teaser for the fundraise, ready to circulate.
Three working documents, each with a matching presentation deck, plus an investor teaser — nine branded artefacts in total, produced and iterated over multiple review rounds.
Every regulatory position and industry figure is sourced and dated. The strategy document doubles as an operating tool: its supplier terms annex can be issued to a vendor as-is, and its 90-day annex is a checklist the founders can run without us.
01
Document
Data, Technology & AI Strategy
02
Deck
Strategy — board-ready
03
Document
Concept & operating model
04
Deck
Concept — investor-ready
05
Document
Investor positioning brief
06
Deck
Positioning — fundraise narrative
07
Annex
Supplier data terms — issue-ready
08
Annex
90-day founder checklist
09
Teaser
Investor teaser — visual one-pager
The data ownership standard landed before the marketing and rewards suppliers entrenched their own silos, which means the group's core asset gets built once, cleanly, rather than reassembled later at multiples of the cost.
The investor materials then tell that story as an advantage: this is a hospitality group with software economics, built on a customer asset incumbents cannot replicate.
Building something where the customer relationship is the asset?
The right time to set the data rules is before the first supplier contract, not after the tenth. Talk to us early.
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