Growth Strategy
Building a business worth more than the people in it.
How we helped the founders of a successful electric two-wheeler engineering consultancy turn technical reputation into enterprise value.
EV engineering and design · United Kingdom, India and Kenya
The company
CoexLion is an engineering and design consultancy for the electric two-wheeler industry, founded by engineers from Triumph, Hero and Ola, with teams in the UK, Bangalore and Kenya. Its work spans powertrain, electronics, chassis, battery systems and industrial design for manufacturers building the next generation of electric motorcycles.
In a few years the founders had built a genuinely international business with deep technical credibility and an inbound reputation that brought major manufacturers to them.
The challenge
The business was successful, but two things limited how far it could go.
The first was scalability. Winning work and delivering it both relied on a small number of key people, which capped how much the business could take on and how quickly it could grow.
The second was enterprise value. A consultancy that sells problem-solving is worth a multiple of what its people bill. It owns no product, no licensable design, nothing that generates value when the team is not directly working. The founders had built something valuable to run, but not yet something valuable to own.
So they came to us with a clear question.
How do we create a strategy to build a valuable business, in line with our ambition?
What we did
We ran a short diagnostic, then a series of strategy workshops with the wider team across the UK and India. Bringing in people beyond the founders mattered. The initiatives that came out of it depended on the wider team changing how they worked, and they were far more likely to do that having helped shape the plan.
We included some grounding in strategy theory in the workshops, so the team shared a common language for the trade-offs rather than relying on us to translate. The output was a long-term direction and a concrete set of initiatives, focused on two areas.
Protect and improve the core
The consultancy had to fund everything else, so it had to work harder first. Two initiatives:
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Improve processes for scalability and apply strategic pricing to improve margins. The business was competing on specialist expertise and engineering quality, and its pricing needed to reflect that rather than being set by what clients expected to pay.
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Design the organisation and the incentives around it. Clear roles, clear accountability and an incentive structure that improved efficiency and reduced how much the business depended on any one founder.
Build customer-funded growth
The team was rebuilding the same components across different client projects and giving the value away each time. The plan was to turn that repeated work into reusable, ownable designs, developed and protected as IP but funded by the client work already coming in.
Alongside it, a way to use the spare capacity that appears in quieter periods, so the gaps between projects built something rather than costing money.
Together the two areas pointed at the same outcome: a business that generates value beyond the hours its founders put in, and is worth considerably more as a result.
The outcome
The founders came out with a long-term direction, a shared understanding of it across the UK and Indian teams, and a sequenced set of initiatives to get there. Each one has a named owner and a clear reason for existing, which is what makes a strategy survive contact with a busy week.
The direction it set proved out sooner than anyone expected. Within months, CoexLion was approached by a strategic acquirer.
How we worked
Pierre and Peter worked directly with the founders and the wider team across both countries. Fractional executive capacity, brought in to answer a question the founders did not have time to answer themselves.