Created by devmizanur.com
Founder, chief executive and board director. I have spent twenty years building companies in logistics, health systems and industrial software, and now split my time between a small number of boards, a handful of investments, and writing.
A small number of engagements each year, chosen for whether there is a real operating problem underneath the request.
Non-executive and chair roles where the work is genuinely operational rather than ceremonial, with a bias towards companies between Series B and profitability.
Short, intensive engagements with founding teams facing a specific structural problem: a broken cadence, a stalled hiring plan, a market that has shifted underneath them.
Seed and Series A cheques into founders building unglamorous infrastructure, usually in logistics, health systems and industrial software.
Interim executive roles in businesses that are structurally sound and operationally lost, typically eighteen months from stabilisation to handover.
Conference keynotes and closed-door sessions on scaling, capital strategy and the parts of executive work that are rarely discussed honestly.
Essays, long-form case studies and an occasional newsletter on operating discipline, published here and syndicated selectively.
Companies built, turned around and backed. The filter below sorts by the kind of involvement.
Twenty years, five companies and a reasonable number of mistakes.
Eighteen months, four people and a product nobody wanted. The most expensive and most useful education available.
Joined at forty people and left at six hundred, having learned what a functioning operating cadence looks like from the inside.
Started in a borrowed room above a pharmacy with a thesis about clinical record interoperability that took four years to prove.
Took over a profitable business with a structurally obsolete cost base and rebuilt it around software.
Acquired by Meridian Health Group. Stayed through a twelve-month integration, which was harder than the seven years preceding it.
A £1.1bn listing and the end of an era. Stepped back from executive roles the following spring.
Moved deliberately from running one company to helping several, plus writing and the Founders Table programme.
Where I currently sit, and where I have sat before.
Industrial automation company; chair of the remuneration committee since 2021.
Advised the group board through the integration of Halcyon Health.
A charitable trust funding vocational training across the North of England.
Developer tooling company; joined as chair at Series B.
Awards and honours, listed mostly because people ask.
Recognised for the growth of Halcyon Health across nine markets.
Listed in the technology category following the Northwind restructuring.
Awarded to Northwind Logistics two years after the operating model rebuild.
For contribution to industrial modernisation in the North West.
Three levels of involvement, from a single conversation to a multi-year board seat.
For founders with one specific question
A single ninety-minute session, prepared for properly. No follow-on commitment expected on either side.
Book a callFor teams facing a structural problem
Eight to twelve weeks embedded with the executive team, ending with a documented operating cadence you own.
Start a conversationFor companies past Series B
A non-executive or chair role with genuine operating involvement, taken on for a small number of companies at a time.
EnquireThe questions that come up most often
Founders, chairs and partners I have worked alongside.
Adrian arrived into a business that had convinced itself its problems were external. Within a quarter the conversation had changed entirely, and within a year so had the numbers.
The most useful board member I have worked with, largely because he asks the question everyone else has quietly decided not to ask.
He is unusually good at telling founders something they do not want to hear in a way that leaves them able to act on it. That is rarer than it sounds.
We brought Adrian in for eight weeks and are still using the operating cadence he set up three years later. Best money we have spent.
Clear-eyed about capital in a way that is genuinely uncommon among operators. He saved us from a term sheet we were about to sign out of exhaustion.
No theatre, no frameworks for the sake of it. He looks at what is actually happening and then says so plainly.
Trusted by operators and investors
