Merali Advisory | Fractional Chief of Staff

Time inside the business is crowding out time on it.

More decisions land on your desk every week. Priorities compete. The clarity that once came naturally is harder to find.

You can feel the gap between where the business is and where it could be. But the work of closing it keeps falling to you by default: the strategy, the structure, the alignment, the capability. Because there's nobody else.

The few times you've tried to fix this by delegating or bringing someone in, the pressure didn't lift. It just shifted.

This is what Merali Advisory was built for. Providing Fractional Chief of Staff support to help scaling founders build the clarity, structure, and leadership bandwidth their business needs to grow.

Fortune 500 experience at a fraction of the cost.

I worked with leaders across multiple business functions during my decade-long experience at Philip Morris International, where I earned six promotions, moving across Supply Chain Operations, Strategy & Transformation, External Affairs and finally Commercial, where I took on a leadership position.

My influence went beyond the functions I worked within, as I shaped cross-functional processes and paired up with various directors to help their functional strategy come to life: whether it was facilitation of a workshop for the IT Director and his leadership team to create a project roadmap for the year, or pairing up with the HR Director to help build the strategic priorities for the function.

My experience gave me a clear understanding of two things that rarely sit together in one person: how commercial strategy gets shaped and prioritised, and how the work of bringing it to life flows through an organisation. How the parts connect, where the gaps tend to appear, and what good structure, clear ownership, and disciplined execution actually look like at scale. And crucially, how to bring the right parts of that to a business that needs it, without the bureaucracy that often comes with it.

Now I'm working with founders to give them access to Fortune 500 experience and expertise at a fraction of the cost.

I describe myself as someone with a cool head, a warm heart, and busy hands. I think clearly, bring structure without bureaucracy, leadership without formal authority, and pace without panic. I'm the critical friend your business needs to thrive. Someone who has the business' best interests at heart, and will give you the honest challenge that genuinely helps.

What I do.

I work across both the strategic and operational layers of your business: helping you cut through the noise, build the structure you need to scale, and make better decisions with a trusted partner alongside you.

My work spans five interconnected areas:

Strategy & Prioritisation

Helping you focus on what actually moves the needle. Facilitating strategy workshops, building the strategic plan, and working with leadership to prioritise, so effort and capital aren't diluted across too many things at once.

Advisory & Honest Challenge

A sounding board and critical friend. Helping you see around corners, anticipate problems before they land, and make better decisions rooted in genuine care for the business, not telling you what you want to hear.

Founder & Team Dynamics

Sometimes the most important work is human. A trusted, independent presence for the leadership team, navigating co-founder and leadership dynamics with discretion, surfacing tensions before they become crises.

Operating Model & Governance

Designing and building the operating model: the forums, processes, governance structures, and delivery cadence that allow the business to get things done without constant founder involvement.

Business Process Improvement

Mapping and improving the cross-functional processes that create friction. Working bottom-up with the people doing the work to diagnose root causes, design improvements, and embed them into how the business operates.

Testimonials

"Husein has been a game changer for our business. He has been instrumental in taking us from a £5m loss-making business to a £10m profitable business, with exciting prospects for the future."

"Transparently, there wouldn't have been a business, both from a personal relationship perspective, but also from a profitability perspective. We were loss-making with little clarity on where we were and where we were going."

"A strategic advisor that sits within the business but critically also plays the role of a very high quality executor. As founders, there are plenty of people that give us opinions. However, what we truly need is opinion plus people who jump in, understand the problems and opportunities, and help to execute and land it."

"The investment sounds like a lot of money, and you need to invest for a few weeks or months to see and feel the real value. However, when you consider the value of the output, the strategic direction, and that a core part of his role is infrastructure and capability building, we have received multiples return in exchange."

Case Study

From £5m to £10m. From loss-making to profitable. In 18 months.

BrainGain is a high-growth DTC e-commerce brand selling premium home fitness equipment across the UK and EU. When I joined as Fractional Chief of Staff in January 2025, the business was four years in, operating at approximately £5m revenue, and struggling to make consistent profit. Both founders were buried in day-to-day detail. The co-founder relationship was under significant strain.

Over 18 months I worked across strategy, operating model design, team capability, and business process improvement, surfacing the real problems, not just the visible ones, and building the structure the business needed to grow.

£5m → £10m Revenue

<0% → 9–10% Net margin

3x Peak season volumes

35% → 55% Own channel sales

Read the full case study →

Simple by design.

I work with a small number of founders at any one time, at depth, not at volume. The fractional model means you get genuine attention, genuine care, and genuine challenge.

Initial conversation

No pitch, no proposal. An honest discussion about where your business is, what isn't working, and whether there's a fit. If it feels right for both of us, we move forward.

Diagnostic

I start by getting into the business, speaking to you, your team, and understanding how the problems actually manifest in practice. The goal is to surface the real root causes, not just the symptoms.

Design and build

We agree a plan of attack. I work across the business, with you and with your team, to design and implement solutions that are fit for where you are, not borrowed from somewhere else.

Embed and sustain

My role is temporary by design. As the work lands, I'm raising capability and building structures that sustain themselves, so that when I step back, the business is stronger than when I arrived.

Partnering with me works best when...

You've built real commercial momentum, but you're feeling the weight of it.

Typically past the £5m mark, growing fast, but the complexity is starting to outpace the structure.

You're talented and driven, but stretched too thin to lead strategically.

You need someone to hold the strategic thread while you focus on what only you can do.

You want to build something sustainable.

Not just react to what's in front of you, but put the right foundations in place for lasting growth.

You want honest challenge, not validation.

Someone who will tell you the truth, even when it's not what you want to hear.

This isn't the right fit if you need...

A consultant who produces a report and disappears.

I work inside the business, not above it.

A project manager for purely tactical tasks.

My work is strategic and structural.

Someone to replace your team rather than work alongside them.

I raise capability. I don't substitute for it.

The business is growing. But you're running out of bandwidth to lead it.