Scott Gelbard's Blogger

By Scott Gelbard, Founder — SGI Global Partners / Managing Partner — Peak Ventures I sat across from a CEO once who had a genuinely brilliant strategy. The market opportunity was real. The numbers were compelling. The competitive moat was defensible. He had spent six months building it with his team, and it showed. When he finished walking me through the deck, I had only one question: "Could you explain it to someone who's never worked in your industry?" He couldn't. That presentation never made it in front of his board. The strategy never got funded. Not because it was wrong — it wasn't. It failed because nobody could understand it well enough to believe in it. That experience lodged itself in my mind. Over the course of 25 years advising businesses across North America, Europe, and Asia, I've seen brilliant strategies die in boardrooms and mediocre ones get funded simply on the strength of how they were told. The difference, more often than not, co...

By Scott Gelbard, Founder — SGI Global Partners / Managing Partner — Peak Ventures I have been involved in more joint ventures than I can count — as an advisor, as a structuring party, and occasionally as someone called in when things have already started to go sideways. And if there is one pattern that stands out above all others in international business, it is this: the joint ventures that fall apart rarely do so at launch. They unravel somewhere between month 18 and month 36. Quietly at first, then suddenly. Year three is where the bodies are buried. Understanding why — and what to do about it — is one of the most practically useful things I can offer any executive or founder who is considering a joint venture as part of their growth strategy. Why the Early Years Feel Like Success Joint ventures typically begin with genuine enthusiasm on both sides. There is a complementary logic that brought the parties together: one has the market access, the other has the capital or ...

By Scott Gelbard, Founder — SGI Global Partners / Managing Partner — Peak Ventures There is a version of this conversation I have had dozens of times, in different cities, with different founders, in different industries. It goes something like this: a business owner walks into the room — successful by any reasonable measure, profitable, growing, well-regarded in their market. And somewhere in the first twenty minutes, they say something that stops me cold. "We don't really have a formal finance function. We have a bookkeeper and an accountant. That's always been enough." What they mean is: the business has never run out of cash, the accountant files the taxes on time, and the bookkeeper keeps the P&L clean enough to manage by. In the early years of a business, that is often genuinely sufficient. But the business I'm looking at is not in its early years. It is doing real revenue, carrying real operational complexity, considering expansion, thinking abo...

By Scott Gelbard, Founder — SGI Global Partners / Managing Partner — Peak Ventures There's a belief that runs deep in business culture: if you hire the right people, everything else follows. Hire smart, hungry, talented people, give them the room to run, and the strategy will take care of itself. I've watched brilliant executives build careers on this idea. I've also watched some of them preside over very expensive failures because of it. Talent matters enormously. I'd never argue otherwise. Over 25 years advising businesses across North America, Europe, and Asia, some of the finest minds I've encountered were sitting inside companies that were heading in entirely the wrong direction. And here's what I've learned: great talent doesn't fix a broken strategy. It accelerates its consequences. When Talent Becomes a Liability The best people don't stay quietly aligned with a strategy they can see isn't working. They push. They probe. They su...

By Scott Gelbard, Founder — SGI Global Partners / Managing Partner — Peak Ventures People talk about bad advice in terms of financial loss. The deal that fell apart. The market entry that failed. The restructuring that made things worse. These are real costs, and they're the ones that show up in post-mortems and legal claims. But in my experience, the most damaging consequences of bad advice aren't the ones you can quantify on a spreadsheet. They're the ones that compound quietly for years before anyone connects them back to their origin. I've been in this business long enough to have seen both sides. I've given advice I later wished I'd qualified differently. I've also been called in to help businesses recover from guidance they received elsewhere that turned out to be spectacularly wrong. What strikes me, every time, is how much more expensive the invisible costs are than the visible ones. The Three Real Costs The first is time. Bad advice typica...

By Scott Gelbard, Founder — SGI Global Partners / Managing Partner — Peak Ventures For most of my career, impact investing was treated as a category that required an apology. You could do well or you could do good — the implicit assumption was that you couldn't do both with full conviction on either side. Impact was philanthropy with ambition, or it was returns with a conscience clause. The family offices and private wealth structures I worked with either avoided it entirely, dabbled in it as a small allocation to satisfy a family member's values, or made genuine commitments to it while quietly accepting that they were leaving returns on the table. That has changed. Not uniformly, and not without complexity — but the change is real, and the families and advisors who haven't updated their thinking are operating on assumptions that no longer hold. What's Actually Different The shift isn't primarily ideological. It's structural. The data on performance ha...

Scott Gelbard, Founder — SGI Global Partners / Managing Partner — Peak Ventures Every accomplished business owner I've worked with has a version of the same problem. They are surrounded by smart, capable professionals — lawyers, accountants, bankers, consultants, board members. Each one is technically excellent in their domain. Each one gives sound advice within their lane. And yet, there is almost always a gap. Someone who sees the whole picture. Someone who can sit across from the founder and say, "I've thought about this from every angle, here's what I actually think, and here's what I'd do if it were mine." Not a report. Not a findings document. A real conversation from someone who has skin in the outcome — not financial skin, but reputational and relational skin. Someone who genuinely can't afford to be wrong. That role — the trusted advisor in the inner circle — is one of the most valuable relationships a business owner can cultivate. It ...