EP212: What Private Equity Isn't Telling You Before You Sign with Alexis Sikorsky

Alexis Sikorsky is a #1 international bestselling author and Special Advisor to founders of privately held £5M–£20M businesses. Through Knightscale Partners, he helps founder-led companies break through the Five Million Plateau, remove founder dependency, build the senior operating layer they are missing, and prepare for scale, recapitalisation or private equity exit.

He moved into this work after founding, scaling and selling New Access, a Switzerland-based private banking software company, through a staged nine-figure private equity exit. That experience showed him the gap between generic online advice and what actually happens in boardrooms when founders are preparing for liquidity, negotiating with investors, or realising the business cannot keep scaling while every major decision still runs through them.

Today, Alexis works with founders at the point where the habits that built the company start to limit the company. A founder can be the biggest asset in the early years, but around the £5M–£20M stage, they can become the bottleneck if the business still relies on their memory, energy, relationships and constant intervention. At Knightscale Partners, Alexis works alongside co-founder Topher Morrison and a roster of experienced senior operators to give founder-led businesses access to the C-suite thinking they need before they are ready to hire a full-time executive team.