Services offered by Shadow Leaders. Scaling a company means you suddenly need help everywhere at once.
A fundraising strategist this quarter. A legal mind the next. An AI advisor, an operator who has already done it, a seasoned voice for your board. Most leaders answer that by hiring separate consultants, signing separate retainers, and losing hours every week just keeping everyone aligned.
Shadow Leaders replaces all of that with one relationship. Your dedicated Gatekeeper, our founder Stefan van Eerde, learns your business first, then brings in exactly the right specialists from our private collective of proven operators, former chief executives, investors, and global experts across legal, AI, GTM, funding, leadership, and growth.
One partner. One gatekeeper. One agreement. The full bench of a top advisory firm with experienced founders and leaders.
You brief once, you keep control (over your equity), and you stop paying for retainers you never fully use.
Sometimes you do not need an advisor but someone who roles up his or her sleeves and gets the work done. Because you lack the manpower to do it. Strategically, yet practically.
CEOs of larger SMB companies who cannot afford to wait and stagnate, and Founders of scale-ups seeking accelerated growth with help from other experienced scale-up founders, advisors and mentors.
We help scale-up founders remove the bottlenecks that block the next stage of growth.
Stage | What it solves | Format |
Diagnose | Clarifies the bottlenecks, challenges and ambitions of the founder | Growth Strategy Session + Report with findings |
Design | Creates the growth plan | Workshop + roadmap |
Deploy | Makes growth reality | Retainer and fractional support for the duration of the project |
A recurring pain is that the sales motion becomes inconsistent as the company grows, leading to bloated pipelines, weak qualification, and unpredictable revenue. Founders also need help with pricing, packaging, customer retention, and building a more mature revenue engine.
Several sources point to the need for experienced human advisors, peer sparring, and a trusted community as scale-up CEOs face increasing complexity and isolation. In practice, founders want a sounding board for high-stakes decisions, not just specialist execution help.
Scale-up founders need help with cash planning, financial visibility, fundraising strategy, and understanding the right balance between growth and profitability.
As companies grow, founders need better KPIs, OKRs, decision cadences, cross-functional governance, and operating rhythms so growth does not create chaos. The challenge is not just strategy, but building the systems that make strategy repeatable.
Scale-up growth often breaks because roles, decision rights, leadership layers, culture, and management systems do not evolve fast enough. McKinsey’s work highlights talent, culture, planning, the leadership team, and board/investor management as core scaling priorities.
Help with pipeline quality, qualification, sales process, pricing, retention, and customer expansion.
Monthly advisory support for the CEO on strategy, trade-offs, hiring, board/investor management, and execution.
Support with financial planning, runway, scenario modeling, fundraising readiness, and growth/profitability trade-offs.
Define roles, decision rights, meeting cadence, KPI/OKR structure, and cross-functional accountability.
Support hiring strategy, org design, leadership development, and culture preservation during growth.
Minimum of 6 hours per week (27 hours per month) of having one or more advisor(s) by your side.
Flexible 6-12 month engagements.
6-month commitment:
12-month commitment:
Björn Larsson, serial entrepreneur and investor from Sweden, created this process based on his own experience as a founder in raising several rounds of funding and enriched his experience with years of training and data he collected throughout the past decades. He is also an investor so understand both angles.
You are a founder who knows what (s)he is doing, but do you know if you are ready for a series A or series B?
Go through the Investor Readiness Process and you find answers on the questions you have and the questions investors will ask.
Get clarity on your financial and business outcomes and goals and how you can work toward an exit, where everyone wins.
A certified IRP instructor will guide you through the process to make sure you do not miss anything and are truly ready when the time is right.
An objective way to understand if you are ready for investment or perhaps you are better of without investors? The IRP will show you.
Talk to a certified IRP instructor to share your ideas and challenges and see if you are ready for this process.
Meet your instructor weekly and stay accountable. Do your ‘homework’ in between meetings via the system.
Get a clear overview of the Risks, the Value your company brings, the Sales optimization cycle and how much funding you need per round.
At the end of the process you get a shareable report and access to a large group of investors.
Get clarity on how your exit and your company valuation will compound over time and also how the investors’ exits will look like. Know your equity dillusion and your growth trajectory.
Spend approx. 2 to 4 hours of your time to have meetings with the instructor and fill in your data in the system.
6 week process of meetings and data entry to give you (and investors) the clarity you need.
6 week process:
Our Shadow Leaders Non-Executive Director (NED) service provides strategic, boardroom-level sparring and C-level advisory from our most experienced former CEOs, CMOs, and Sales Directors.
Exclusively designed for CORPORATE C-Level executives seeking to enhance their strategic impact and decision-making.
Master essential meetings with enterprise clients, investors, or co-founders.
Ensure successful meeting outcomes and strategic alignment.
Gain invaluable insights for top-tier corporate governance.
Approx. 2-8 hours/week dedicated to your needs.
Flexible 6-12 month engagements.
(for a 6-month minimum commitment)
