smart. simple.
strategic.
driving sustainable, profitable growth.
FOR
Businesses
Legal, governance and risk advisory that supports confident commercial growth.
FOR
Legal Teams
Deep expertise to help build, reshape and optimise your in-house legal team's capability.
FOR
People
Executive coaching for leaders working in complex, high-pressure environments.
What we do
One practice,
six disciplines.
Governance
We establish better governance controls that underpin responsible, ethical conduct and build trust with your stakeholders. Good governance is the foundation of sustainable performance.
Ethics & Compliance
We help you embed within your organisation the frameworks and values necessary to drive ethical and compliant behaviours, protecting your brand and instilling confidence in stakeholders.
Risk Management
We design and implement comprehensive risk management frameworks that allow you to make quantified, intelligent decisions about the risks to your business and how to address them.
Legal
We build or optimise your in-house legal capability, helping you navigate legal issues pragmatically, cost-effectively and in alignment with your strategic objectives.
Our consulting covers the full value chain: from purpose and strategy to capability, organisational design, and implementing the right processes, policies and technology to suit your business.
Organisational Coaching
Our coaching services empower your people to navigate challenges and seize opportunities, driving both personal and organisational growth.
We are also accredited to administer the Team Management Profile (TMP) and the Opportunities-Obstacles Quotient (OOQ), two powerful psychometric tools that deepen coaching insights.
Crisis Management
When something goes seriously wrong - a regulatory investigation, a data breach, a public dispute, a key person departure - your response matters. We help you respond quickly, coordinating legal, communications and operational responses, managing your partner network and keeping you focused on what matters. So you stay in control when it counts.
How we work
Resilience to match
your
ambition
You've built something worth protecting. Let's make sure it stays that way.
Start-ups and scale-ups are wired for growth, but fast growth creates gaps across governance, contracts, employment, intellectual property, OHS, privacy and increasingly artificial intelligence. Left unaddressed, those gaps can cause nasty surprises or erode the value of everything you've built when you decide to raise, sell or scale further.
We help you fix what's burning, then make sure it doesn't happen again.
When live issues are costing you time and money, we move fast. Whether it's a business sale or acquisition, a difficult commercial negotiation, a dispute, or an employment matter, we step in with senior-level expertise and manage it to resolution. Where specialist input is needed across legal, communications, marketing, operations or finance, we can engage and manage our trusted partner network so you don't have to.
Once the fires are out, we don't walk away.
We dig into the root causes: why did this happen, and what does it expose? From there, we can build a practical roadmap so your business becomes as resilient as it is ambitious, blending consulting solutions with coaching to drive lasting organisational and behavioural change. Whether you're heading toward a raise or exit, or simply want to focus on growing your business without the distraction and cost of things going wrong, the goal is the same: protect your enterprise value and build a business that's as resilient as it is ambitious.
Top-tier expertise. No big-firm overhead.
Our principal is a former General Counsel and C-suite executive with multinational experience, bringing board-level perspective and deep commercial judgment to businesses that need it most. We've worked with start-ups, scale-ups and ASX-listed companies across media, advertising, technology, manufacturing, construction and health, so whatever your sector or stage of growth, we understand the landscape you're operating in.
Who we are
Smart advice,
global experience
Mark Guthrie is a seasoned lawyer with over 25 years' global experience across private practice and in-house roles. He spent 13 years as General Counsel with a global advertising group where he built and led high-performing legal teams in both the UK and Australia & New Zealand, before becoming the global group’s General Counsel, Commercial and their Chief Legal Innovation Officer. During his tenure, he was a director of the group's Australian and New Zealand companies, member of the ANZ Executive Leadership Team and Chair of the ANZ Risk Committee.
He is consistently recognised for his empathy, pragmatism, collaboration, strategic thinking, creativity and highly commercial approach.
Mark holds an Honours Degree in Law and Postgraduate Diploma in Legal Practice from the University of Strathclyde, Scotland, and is admitted as a solicitor in Scotland and England & Wales. He also holds Certificates in Strategic Executive Management and in Organisational Effectiveness from Said Business School, University of Oxford. He is also an accredited organisational coach and a member of the Institute of Executive Coaching and Leadership (IECL).
As well as the IECL, he is a member of the Law Society of Scotland, CLOC (Corporate Legal Operations Consortium), the Centre for Legal Innovation, the Australian Institute of Company Directors and the International Association of Privacy Professionals.
Mark has one incredibly patient wife and two mischievous Miniature Schnauzers, Gretel and Gracie. He splits his time between Melbourne and Foster, South Gippsland, where he volunteers as a Deputy Unit Controller with his local SES unit.
Contact us
Let's catch up
over coffee
If you'd like to know more, we'd love the opportunity to grab a coffee and have a chat.