These are the 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 expert to join 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.
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.
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 joining them as a board advisor or Non-Executive Director (NED).
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.
Approx. 2-8 hours/week dedicated to your needs.
Flexible 6-12 month engagements.
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 or budget to do it or hire someone full-time to do it. Strategically, yet practically.
Founders of fast-growing startups, scale-ups and for investors who need to take better care of their portfolio companies and need the right experts in the room.
No recruitment fees, no hassle. Just select the fractional leader(s) you want to work with, jump on a call and get it done.
You do not need to pay for full-time leaders, more flexibility for a lower price.
You can work with a selection of Shadow Leaders based on the challenges and ambitions in your company. Successful scale-ups use teams of fractional leaders. Some call this growth squads, we call it wolf packs, where we hunt together with you, the true Leader of your own company.
Minimum of 8 hours per week (up to 4 days per week) of having one or more fractional leader(s) by your side.
Flexible 6-12 month engagements.
