What an Investment Thesis Taught Me About Business Survival

Most business strategy is built on one unspoken assumption: that the world your business operates in tomorrow will be roughly the same as the one it operates in today. That assumption is now wrong. And most leaders haven't caught up with that yet.

There's a version of business planning that looks thorough, covers all the right bases, asks all the right questions - and still gets you into serious trouble because every conclusion it draws is grounded in an economic reality that's already shifting faster than the plan accounts for. I've watched it happen to businesses that looked stable on paper. I've had to go into those businesses afterwards and figure out what to do about it.

What I want to share here is how I came to understand why the standard approach isn't sufficient anymore - and what a more honest version of strategic thinking actually looks like.

Where this started

In November last year, an angel investors group asked me to lead a working group on an AI investment thesis. The question was simple enough: how do we evaluate AI businesses looking for investment? Which are defensible, which aren't, and how do you tell the difference before you put your money in?

We came at it the way you'd expect people who've spent serious time in business to come at it - from first principles. We mapped the technology stack, from energy infrastructure and semiconductor fabrication through to the application layer, so we had a shared vocabulary and understood where value flows and where it pools. We studied the historical waves - what actually happened to returns during dot-com, cloud, mobile, SaaS. Where did the money go, who captured it, why did most of the early entrants lose it? Then we built a defensibility scoring framework: a rigorous way of separating real moats from pitch deck fiction, working through integration depth, switching costs, data accumulation, network effects, and distribution across the full stack.

The work is interesting and engaging. The kind of thinking that sharpens your judgment far beyond the narrow question you started with. But the further we got into building the thesis, the more I felt that something fundamental was missing. Not from the framework - the framework was sound. From the assumptions the framework rested on.

Every conclusion I was drawing assumed that the world these businesses were operating in today was roughly the world they'd be operating in tomorrow. And I no longer believed that.

The question nobody was asking

You can build the most sophisticated defensibility scoring model imaginable and it still won't tell you what happens when the economic environment around the business shifts structurally. That is precisely what is happening right now. Not gradually, not theoretically - fast, and in ways that most planning frameworks aren't designed to absorb.

So I started asking questions from a different perspective: not just whether a business is well-positioned today, but who is actually going to have money to spend in five years - and whether this business is positioned to serve them. What happens to the labour market as knowledge work gets automated at scale? What happens to consumer spending when mid-level professional services workers - the people buying mortgages, paying for services, sustaining local economies - start losing ground? Who is wealthy in that world, and who isn't, and what does that do to the revenue assumptions sitting inside every strategy being built right now?

These are more uncomfortable questions. And they led me somewhere I hadn't expected to go.

Sebastian Gritt and James Barker

To make the abstract concrete, I wrote two stories. The first follows Sebastian Gritt, a project manager living in central Bristol. Decent salary, mortgage he can just about manage, no children, no particular reason he shouldn't have been able to adapt to what was coming. By 2028, he's doing warehouse shifts. The second follows James Barker, the MD of the firm Sebastian worked for - a man who genuinely believed he was handling the disruption responsibly, who made decisions that looked rational within his existing planning assumptions, and who watched his business deteriorate in ways he hadn't anticipated because those assumptions had already stopped being true. Both stories live on the Harshlight platform, where I explore the human and economic dimensions of what AI disruption actually means for individuals and the organisations they work in.

I didn't write them out of humanitarian concern, or not only out of humanitarian concern. I wrote them because I needed to understand what I was actually looking at when I walked into a business and started asking questions about its future. What happens to Sebastian is a direct consequence of decisions James made. James made those decisions inside a set of assumptions - about his market, his cost base, his workforce, his customers - that turned out to be wrong in ways he could have seen coming, if he'd been asking the right questions.

That's the connection I hadn't seen clearly before I started writing. The investment thesis and the turnaround work are the same work, approached from different directions.

What I do now, and why it's different

I spent twelve years as Managing Director of a South West manufacturing business, leading it through crisis, cultural transformation, and exiting in 2025. Before that, I worked in global banking. What those twelve years gave me, more than anything, is a very clear understanding of what business distress actually looks like from inside - as opposed to how it looks on a spreadsheet from the outside.

The most dangerous moment in any business is not when the crisis arrives. It's the period before that, when the indicators are visible and the organisation either lacks the framework to understand what they mean, or lacks the commercial courage to act on what they're seeing. By the time the bank is asking questions, you've already burned most of your options.

The work I do now sits at the intersection of restructuring, strategic transformation, and economic scenario thinking - a clear view of where things are heading and what that means for this specific business, its market, its people, its capital position. Whether a business comes to me because it's already in trouble or because it's stable enough to be proactive, the underlying challenge is the same: build a strategic vision grounded in where the world is going, not where it's been, then create the alignment, the cultural capacity, and the operational momentum to pursue it. And treat the strategy as a working hypothesis, not a fixed plan - because the target is moving. That means you need someone who will tell you when the hypothesis is wrong, not just when the execution is off.

The person I wanted in the room

When I was in the worst of it - the crisis years, the cultural transformation, the periods when the commercial pressure and the people decisions and the strategic uncertainty all landed at the same time - there was a very specific kind of person I wanted alongside me. Not a consultant who'd arrive with a framework built for a different business in a different industry. Not someone who'd tell me what I wanted to hear because they needed the retainer. Someone with brutal commercial honesty, genuine first-principles thinking, the ability to hold the strategic and the operational at the same time, and enough emotional intelligence to understand that the person they were advising was carrying a lot more than was showing up in the numbers.

I didn't find that person. So I spent the next decade in situations that forced me to develop those qualities whether I liked it or not. I'm still working at it - I won't pretend otherwise. But that is the advisor I'm working to become, and it shapes every engagement I take on.

There are two ways businesses typically find their way to me. The first is crisis: the numbers have deteriorated, the bank is asking questions, and the business needs someone who can stabilise it, define a credible path forward, and drive it hard. The second is proactive: the business is stable, but the leadership knows the economics of their industry are moving faster than their current assumptions account for, and they want a framework for navigating that before it becomes a crisis. Different approaches. Same underlying mandate.

The investment thesis started all of this. It's still evolving - because the world it's trying to describe keeps moving. The work on the first three pillars (stack mapping, historical value creation, defensibility mechanisms) remains solid, but building it out honestly now demands three more dimensions: how foundational model economics play out as the technology commoditises; genuine economic transition scenarios that project who has purchasing power in three, five, seven years; and an opportunity mapping framework that cross-references defensibility with those scenarios. Harder questions than we originally scoped. Worth asking properly.

So does the thinking I bring to the businesses I work with. If you haven't built your strategy around a clear-eyed view of what the next five years actually look like for your market, your customers, and your workforce - that's where we start.