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Bring the right
outside thinking
to the table.

The Fifth Chair gives founder-led and mid-sized businesses access to senior commercial perspective without adding permanent executive headcount. Start with the section that matches the decision in front of you.

IBusiness Pulse IIAdvisory Board IIIThe Engine Room IVAI and Automation VFuture Proofing

Work With Me

What an outside voice actually
does for a team.

Most leadership teams don't need more information — they're already drowning in it. What they're short of is someone outside the business who will look at the same picture and see what familiarity has made invisible.

That's the work. Here's what it looks like in practice.

I start by finding the real question, not the one on the agenda. Teams are good at solving the problem in front of them. They're often not good at noticing when they're solving the wrong problem well. So my first job is to sit with your team, listen properly, and name the thing everyone's been circling but nobody's said out loud.

Then I challenge it — directly, but never for sport. I'll pressure-test the strategy, the pricing, the growth plan, the thing you've been meaning to deal with "when things slow down." I've sat through enough of these decisions — from inside the business and outside it — to know the difference between a genuine risk and a comfortable worry. Often the two look identical until someone says it out loud.

And I stay long enough to matter. Insight that doesn't change what you do on Monday is entertainment, not advice. Depending on what you need, that might be a single sharp session, a structured piece of advisory work, hands-on help getting a commercial engine running, or an ongoing seat at your table. The depth flexes. The standard doesn't.

Who this is for: businesses with real momentum and a small leadership team. You've built something that works. You're carrying more than you should. And you've reached the point where the next move matters too much to make with only the views already in the room.

If that's you, the first step is a conversation. No pitch — just a proper look at where you are, and whether an outside voice would help.

Start the conversation

I

The Business
Pulse.

The Fifth Chair · Product 01

The Business Pulse

Diagnostic

Free · 15 Minutes
"You can't fix what you haven't seen clearly."

You can't fix what you haven't seen clearly.

Most business owners are too close to their own operation to see it accurately. Not because they're not smart — but because proximity is a blind spot all by itself.

The Business Pulse is a 18-question diagnostic that maps your business across six dimensions. It takes less than fifteen minutes. What it surfaces can take considerably longer to reckon with.

This is where the outside view begins.

You'll receive a personalised summary of where your business has real momentum — and where the gaps are hiding in plain sight. No generic frameworks. No consultant-speak. Just a clear, honest read on where you actually are.

Six dimensions mapped
01
Founder Dependence
02
Strategic Blind Spots
03
Capacity & Capability
04
Revenue & Growth
05
Business Sophistication
06
Productisation & Innovation
18questions
6dimensions
<15minutes
Free. No obligation.
Take your Pulse
The outside view starts here5thchair.com

II

Single engagement

The Advisory
Board.

Black and white boardroom table with The Fifth Chair notebooks and documents
The outside voice at the table

Most businesses don't lack advice. They may lack the right question — asked at the right moment, by someone with no agenda.

The Advisory Board is a custom prompt that sit's within your workspace, and works with any AI assistant. It is dedicated to you and gives you three senior voices: a Strategist who focuses on where your business is heading, a Revenue Advisor who finds what you're leaving on the table, and a Finance Advisor who reads what the numbers are really saying.

Voice One

The Strategist

Focuses on where the business is actually heading and whether the current moves support that direction.

Voice Two

The Revenue Advisor

Finds what is being left on the table across positioning, sales rhythm, pricing, retention and commercial focus.

Voice Three

The Finance Advisor

Reads what the numbers are really saying, so decisions are grounded in commercial reality.

They don't always agree. That's deliberate.

One question at a time. No cheerleading. No unvarnished truths, no punches held. The kind of thinking that changes how you run your business — available the moment you need it.

Private. Independent. Yours.

III

The Revenue
Room.

Where the money gets made. Or quietly given away.

Boardroom with strategic growth insights displayed on a screen
Commercial levers pulled in the same direction

Every business has one. The room that powers everything else — pricing, pipeline, margin, the deals you chase and the ones you walk away from. It's the heart of the business. When it's working, everything downstream works with it. When it isn't, no amount of effort anywhere else makes up the difference.

Here's the problem. When you're in that room every day, you stop seeing it. The discount you give away to close — every time, almost without thinking — that's quietly become your real price. The client who's grown to carry too much of your revenue. The quote that always goes out a day late. Not because you're not good at what you do. Because you're too close to it to see it.

That's what The Engine Room is for.

This is not advice you file and forget. We don't hand over a strategy deck and wish you luck. We sit in the room with you — find where the money's leaking, map the plan to recover it, and direct the execution until it shows up in the numbers.

Thirty-five years of commercial strategy, built into the day-to-day running of your business. Personal direction where it matters. Playbooks, tools and templates where it can be systemised. The processes and policies that turn good intentions into repeatable revenue. Every commercial lever you own — pulled in the same direction, for once.

Top-line driven. Bottom-line protected. Nothing handed off half-finished.

The outside voice that sees what the room can't.

You can't fix what you haven't seen clearly. So let's start with a conversation — an honest look at where your commercial engine is leaking, and what it would take to seal it.

IV

AI &
Automation.

AI and automation, made sensible. And made yours.

Let's be honest AI has become the loudest conversation in business — and the loudest conversation is rarely the most useful one. For some companies, it can feel like a choice between two bad options. Leap in before you understand it, or fall behind. Your employees are already grabbing tools off LinkedIn. AI is already in your business, but how are you managing it.

There's a third way. It's quieter, and it works better.

You don't need to become a technology company. You don't need a data science team, a six-figure platform, or a leap of faith. You need to look honestly at how your business actually runs — the work that eats your team's week, the reports that take three days to tell you what you already suspected, the tasks that slip because someone's stretched too thin — and ask a simpler question. The overwhelm of integrating AI in a small to medium business is not the same as a large corporate. There is a lot more leverage and upside.

What if the machine did the heavy lifting, and your people did the thinking?

That's what this is.

Take the manual, repetitive, after-hours work off your team's plate, and hand it back as time. Not to cut people but to free them to do the work you actually hired them for. That's productivity you can feel immediately.

The cost follows. Fewer errors and delays and less duplication. More output from the team you already have, without adding headcount. That's not a line on a spreadsheet. It's margin you get to keep.

And your employees don't get smaller. They get sharper. This isn't about replacing skills — it's about building them. Giving your team tools that make them more capable, and the confidence to use them well. The businesses that win the next decade won't be the ones with the most technology. They'll be the ones whose people learned to use it.

You don't do it alone, and you don't do it blind.

TFC. Powered by Maximillion.

We know your business — the commercial reality, the pressure, the room. Maximillion knows the technology. They're our strategic partner and the AI credentials behind this work: a software development and AI integration company with twenty years building software, the last ten focused on AI and automation — doing exactly the thing most people find hardest. Turning sophisticated technology into tools an ordinary business can actually use.

What makes the partnership work is what each side refuses to do. We won't hand you technology you don't need. They won't build something that doesn't serve the strategy. Between us: the outside voice that sees what the room can't — and the technical muscle to do something about it.

You don't have to have it all figured out to start. You just have to be willing to look.

Not sure where to start?
Bring the fifth chair in.

Start with the business decision in front of you. We can match the right service from there.

Book a conversation

V

The Fifth
Chair.

Future-Proofing

The outside voice your room has been missing.

Adelaide McKelvey seated in a leather chair by a window
Adelaide McKelvey · The chair held directly

Every room has its blind spots. Yours included. Not because the people in it aren't good — they're the people you trust most. But they're inside the business, the same as you. They see it the way you see it. And the things that will define the next five years of your business are rarely the things the room is already looking at.

That's the chair we take.

Not a consultant — someone who arrives, advises, and leaves you to it. Not a board member — governance from a distance, four times a year. The Fifth Chair is something rarer. A seat at your table, held by someone whose only job is to see what you can't, say what others won't, and help you build the business for what's coming — not just what's in front of you.

This is the heavy lifting.

We take an honest, unflinching look at the whole business — commercial, operational, people, process; the parts that are working and the parts you've been meaning to deal with when things slow down. Then we build the roadmap. Not a report that sits in a drawer. A plan for how this business becomes ready for the next decade — more valuable, more resilient, harder to compete with, easier to run. And we stay in the room while it happens.

This is not for everyone. And it's not meant to be.

We contract with a small number of businesses at any one time — because this work demands depth, and depth doesn't scale. If you're reading this and it fits, it's because your business has reached the point where the right outside voice is no longer a luxury. It's the difference between the business you have and the business you're capable of building.

The chair is Adelaide's, directly. Thirty-five years of building and running businesses, brought to bear on yours. Not delegated. Not diluted. The person, in the room, for as long as the work requires.

You've built something worth protecting. Let's make sure it's still standing — and still winning — long after the room stops being able to see around the next corner.