STRATEGY & M&A ADVISORY · LONDON & CAMBRIDGE
Your next growth move deserves more than a generalist
You’re a technology leader navigating board pressure, markets that don’t wait and M&A. The gap isn’t ambition – it’s the senior, specialist resource to execute alongside you. That’s exactly what we provide: former operators who’ve closed the deals, run the strategies, and sat in the rooms where the real decisions get made.
OUR SERVICES
An embedded strategic partner for ambitious technology leaders
Your board expects a growth roadmap. Your investors expect a value creation plan. But the gap isn’t ambition — it’s the senior, specialist resource to build the plan and execute it alongside you.
Growth roadmap design and prioritisation
Inorganic growth strategy and target landscape mapping
AI strategy and readiness assessment
Market opportunity sizing and competitive positioning
Board-ready strategy narrative and investor story
PE value creation plan development
The Compound Advantage
Strategy, M&A, CDD & VoC under one roof
One team. Compounding context.
What this means for you?
The insight from your growth strategy sharpens our M&A target screening. The intelligence from CDD feeds back into strategy. Each engagement makes the next one faster, sharper, and more valuable.
OUR SERVICES
One integrated advisory practice.
Each service can stand alone or work in combination.
Whether you are building a growth roadmap, pursuing an acquisition, or seeking investment-grade intelligence before a deal, we provide the senior expertise to move with precision.
Buy-Side M&A
“Our growth strategy says acquire — but we’ve never run a buy-side process.”
Your growth strategy has identified acquisition as the right lever. But running a buy-side process alongside day-to-day operations stretches even the strongest leadership team. We step in as your dedicated M&A resource — managed end-to-end by a partner who has closed these deals before.
- Target identification and strategic fit scoring
- Approach, NDA management, and initial diligence
- Deal structuring and negotiation support
- Post-acquisition integration planning
COMMERCIAL DUE DILIGENCE
“We’re about to commit capital. We need someone who’ll interrogate the thesis.”
Before you deploy capital into a technology business, you need someone who’ll stress-test the commercial thesis with the same rigour your IC demands. We interrogate market sizing, competitive dynamics, customer health, and revenue quality — giving you the confidence to proceed, renegotiate, or walk away.
- Total addressable market validation and growth assumptions stress-test
- Competitive moat and positioning assessment
- AI threat / defensibility
- Customer concentration, NRR, and churn risk
- Revenue quality and GTM execution review
ai strategy & readiness
“Everyone’s talking about AI. No one’s told us what to actually do about it.”
We don’t sell AI implementations. We help technology leaders build a clear-eyed view of where AI creates real value in their business, where the risks sit, and what to do first. Every recommendation is grounded in what we actually use ourselves – not a framework borrowed from a slide deck.
- AI maturity diagnostic across operations, product, and GTM
- Opportunity mapping: where AI compounds your existing advantage
- Risk and defensibility assessment – including AI threats to your own moat
- Prioritised roadmap with quick wins and strategic bets
- Board-ready AI narrative that connects to your growth and value creation story
VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER
“The data tells us what’s happening. It doesn’t tell us why.”
When churn spikes, NPS stalls, or a deal thesis needs customer validation, the answers live in conversations – not dashboards. We conduct structured, senior-led interviews with current, churned, and prospective customers to surface the intelligence that quantitative data cannot.
- Structured interview design and senior-led execution
- Customer sentiment, NPS drivers, and churn root cause
- Competitive displacement and win/loss analysis
- Synthesised insight reports with actionable recommendations
For PE & VC Investors
Investor-grade intelligence for technology transactions
You’re about to deploy capital into a technology business. Your IC needs commercial conviction, not a generalist research report. We deliver technology-specialist CDD and VoC built for deal timelines — rigorous, direct, and delivered in as little as three weeks.
We understand deal structures, IC timelines, and what a defensible investment thesis needs to look like. Technology transactions are core to what we do, not a service line we added.
Discuss a live deal3 Weeks
Fastest CDD delivery when deal timelines demand it
100%
Partner-led – no bait-and-switch to junior analysts
CDD + VoC
Combined intelligence – each sharpens the other
Tech Only
SaaS, fintech, and enterprise software specialism
CLIENT OUTCOMES
What happened when our clients stopped deliberating and started executing?
We don’t measure success by the quality of our documents.
We measure it by what our clients do next.
Acquired
A Series C SaaS business closed a transformational acquisition identified and progressed by Lighthouse. three months ahead of their internal timeline.
Renegotiated
A London PE firm used Lighthouse CDD findings to renegotiate deal terms, achieving a material reduction in purchase price based on customer concentration risk identified during diligence.
Retained
A EdTech scale-up used VoC intelligence to address churn drivers that internal data had missed – retaining a customer cohort representing 18% of ARR within one quarter.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Architecting the
intelligent enterprise
We don’t just advise on AI strategy. We practise it daily – and share everything we learn.
AI.proof is our B2B education platform for non-technical business leaders who know AI matters but don’t know where to start. Every week we publish what we’re actually using, testing, and thinking – in plain language, with no agenda beyond making it useful.
It’s not a side project. It’s the reason our clients trust that our advice on AI is grounded in operational reality, not a framework we downloaded last quarter.
AI strategy advisory
Senior-led guidance on integrating AI into commercial operations, strategy processes, and M&A analysis.
AI readiness scorecard
A free diagnostic tool helping business leaders benchmark their organisation’s AI adoption maturity across five dimensions.
Weekly AI newsletter
Curated briefings on AI developments that matter to technology executives — practical, direct, and opinionated.
why lighthouse
Former operators. Not career consultants.
Our partners have held P&L, strategy, and M&A responsibility at FTSE-listed technology companies. We have built teams, closed acquisitions, managed boards, and navigated the operational realities that advisory-only firms can only theorise about.
Learn More“Most advisers tell you what you want to hear. We tell you what you need to know. That’s the only version of this job worth doing.“
– Les Elby, Co-Managing Partner, Lighthouse Advisory Partners
Trusted by the worlds best companies
what out clients say
Six things our clients tell us actually mattered
Not what we say about ourselves – what clients consistently cite when they explain why the work landed differently.
01
“I always spoke to a partner”
by partners with direct sector experience.
No bait-and-switch to junior teams after the pitch.
02
“The intelligence compounded across engagements”
03
“You understood our sector, not just our brief”
04
“We got complete attention, not a managed process”
05
“The outputs were faster than we expected”
06
“You told us what you actually thought”
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
What does a growth strategy engagement look like?
Our growth strategy work is typically retainer-based – a sustained senior partnership that compounds in value the longer it runs, because we accumulate context about your market, your team, and your goals that a project engagement never builds. We start with a diagnostic phase: market landscape, competitive positioning, organic and inorganic options, AI readiness. From there we co-build a prioritised growth roadmap with your leadership team and stay alongside you to execute it. Most retained clients work with us for 12+ months. We recognise that’s a commitment, and we’re comfortable starting with a defined-scope pilot for clients who want to see how we work first.
We’re a PE-backed technology business. How does Lighthouse support value creation plans?
Extensively. PE-backed businesses often arrive with an investor-driven thesis but need an embedded strategic partner to turn it into an executable growth roadmap. We work with the management team to map organic expansion opportunities, identify and qualify acquisition targets, and build the board-ready narrative that demonstrates value creation progress. Because we also do CDD and VoC, the intelligence from deal-related work feeds directly into the ongoing strategy – a compound advantage that standalone strategy consultancies can’t offer.
We’re a VC or PE firm. Do you work with investors as well as operating companies?
A significant portion of our practice is investor-facing – CDD and VoC for technology transactions, where we give investment teams the commercial confidence to proceed, renegotiate, or walk away before capital is deployed. We understand deal structures, IC timelines, and what a defensible investment thesis needs to look like. Technology transactions are core to what we do, not a service line we added.
How is Lighthouse different from a Big Four or large strategy consultancy?
Scale, seniority, and skin in the game. A large firm will assign a senior partner to win the work, then hand delivery to a team of analysts. At Lighthouse, the partners who pitch are the partners who deliver — on every call, every document, every decision point. We also work exclusively in technology, which means we bring genuine sector depth rather than a generalist framework adapted to fit. And because we’re selective about the engagements we take on, we have something large firms rarely do: time to think carefully about your specific situation.
Can you handle commercial due diligence on a tight deal timeline?
Yes, and deal speed is something we design for deliberately. Our CDD process is built to run in parallel with legal and financial diligence, not after it. We’ve delivered rigorous commercial reports in as little as three weeks when deal timelines demanded it. The key is that we start with the highest-risk commercial questions first, not a standardised template. If you have a live deal and a hard deadline, the first conversation should happen today, not next week.
How do you use AI in your work — and why does that matter to me as a client?
We use AI tooling across research and data gathering – broader market scanning, faster information synthesis, richer competitive mapping. It means we spend less of your budget on tasks a machine does well, and more of it on the work that actually requires judgment. Every strategic conclusion, every risk call, every recommendation is made by a Lighthouse partner, not an algorithm. We also run AI.Proof, our own AI education platform, which means when clients want to understand how AI should feature in their own strategy, that conversation is grounded in how we actually operate.
How quickly can we get started?
Faster than you’d expect. We don’t run a lengthy proposal process before we’re willing to have a direct conversation. A first call with a Lighthouse partner typically takes 30 minutes and covers your situation, your timeline, and whether and how we can genuinely help. If we’re not the right fit, we’ll tell you that and, where we can, point you toward someone who is. We’d rather lose a conversation honestly than win an engagement that doesn’t serve you well.
get started
Ready to have a straight conversation about your growth agenda?
Our partners have held P&L, strategy, and M&A responsibility at FTSE-listed technology companies. We have built teams, closed acquisitions, managed boards, and navigated the operational realities that advisory-only firms can only theorise about.
Whether you’re building a growth roadmap, preparing for investment, pursuing an acquisition, or need commercial intelligence before a deal — start with a confidential call with one of our senior partners. We’ll tell you quickly whether and how we can help. No pitch. No pressure. Just clarity.
Get Started