coming alongside
The Company
coming alongside
The Company
A first thought on the Company, its people, and the group that has grown around it.
For Alex, and for the people who look after people at the Company.
My name is Ho, and a friend of mine is the reason this page exists. She mentioned my name to you, you were kind enough to ask what I might bring, and I would like to answer that properly rather than with a brochure.
I have spent twenty five years inside large multinational organisations helping them change, most recently advising COOs and CFOs at dentsu, before that at Richemont, Ralph Lauren and BP. Today I run Trinity, from here in Geneva. The idea behind it is simple: organisations grow through their people, and that growth shows up in how the whole business performs.
I understand there has already been work here on the people side. I would like to hear about it early, what was good in it and what you would shape differently a second time. That tells me far more than a blank page would.
What follows is a way of working, offered in three stages. It is deliberately light at the start, because the first thing I owe you is listening.
From Ho
Everything here is an outside read. Correct me freely, and I will be glad to be corrected.
The Company started in Geneva a few years ago with a clear and good idea: make physical precious metals simple to buy, to hold and to sell. It worked. The platform now serves a large community of investors, with a great deal of metal held in the vaults. Your own careers page still talks about a startup mentality, and from the outside I believe that is real rather than decorative.
Around that company, the group has kept growing. The Company now sits within a larger international group alongside several sister brands, and this year another company joined from Germany. Europe is a larger room than it was eighteen months ago, and the market itself has rarely been busier.
So there are two true things at the same time. There is a Geneva company of a few dozen people, part in the office and part remote across two other countries, who know exactly who they are and how they do things. And there is a group around them that is bigger and newer with each quarter. Both are good news. The value sits in the mix.
Pure gold is beautiful and soft. What makes a bar hold its shape is the mix, chosen on purpose.
These are the three places where a company of this size, inside a group of this shape, tends to gain the most from a little deliberate attention.
When a company sits inside something larger, the most valuable thing it can hold is a single clear account of what it is here to do and where it fits. The test is simple and it is not held in a slide. Ask a customer care agent on a Tuesday afternoon what the Company is building over the next two years, and see whether the answer is the same one you would give.
Leaders usually communicate more than people realise, and people usually hear something a little different from what was intended. That gap is the most useful thing in any organisation to understand, and it opens up in conversation rather than in a form. Closing it is cheap, quick and enormously good for morale, once you know where it sits.
Someone who joined a Geneva startup five years ago now works inside a group with brands across Europe and the United States. Told well, that is a wider horizon rather than a longer reporting line. People want to know what their next five years look like, and someone should be able to answer them warmly and concretely.
It begins with your intent, and everything after it is built on that.
Two or three unhurried conversations with you, in confidence, and with anyone else who holds direction for the Company. Nothing recorded, nothing shared, nothing written down beyond what you want written down.
This stage comes first because everything after it rests on it. If I speak to your people without knowing your intent, I collect opinion. Knowing it, I collect something you can act on.
A selected group of people from across the Company, chosen together with you. Around twelve to eighteen conversations, one to one, in confidence.
Trust builds quickly in this format, and it builds in both directions. By the end of it your people have been properly listened to, which is valuable on its own, whatever comes next.
I bring the two halves together, your intent and what your people actually hear and feel, and turn them into something practical.
Then I hand it over. The roadmap belongs to your team and they carry it. If it helps to have me alongside while they do, that is a separate and later conversation.
The whole of this sits comfortably inside a couple of months, and it shapes itself around your calendar rather than the other way round.
Your own intent, written down. Clear enough that anyone in the company could repeat it and get it right.
An honest read of the room. What your people hear, what they feel, and where that sits next to what you meant.
A prioritised roadmap. Sequenced, sized, and owned by named people inside the Company.
A group of people who were listened to. And who know it, which changes a company more than most programmes do.
I lead from behind, and I hand the power back.
My work is to listen to your intent, to build your people up around it, and then to give the whole thing to your team to own. The best version of this ends with the Company holding something it helped shape, carried by its own people, with my part in it finished and the value staying behind.
I live in Geneva, so being in the office with your team is easy, and the conversations that matter happen in person wherever they can. I work in English, and my French is a work in progress. If a French version of this page would be useful to you, I will arrange one.
If any of this sounds close to what you had in mind, the next step is the smallest one: a conversation between the two of us, with no obligation attached to it. I would enjoy it either way.
