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CognitionHub

Our approach

How we operate the businesses we back.

Not financial engineering. An operating playbook run by people who have built, scaled and exited in the categories we invest in, now running on the AI platform we built for ourselves.

The playbook

Three phases applied to every business we take on.

Sequential but overlapping. Phase 2 and Phase 3 run a parallel asset-optimisation track from day one.

Phase 01

Discovery

Four to six weeks

Forensic pass on the business. We strip assumptions from facts before anything else moves.

  • Unit economics rebuilt from source data, not reported numbers
  • Customer cohorts, retention curves and margin waterfall by SKU, channel and segment
  • Commercial, operational and technology audits against comparable best-in-class
  • Team assessment: who stays, who leads, where the gaps are
  • AI surface audit: where agentic workflows create compounding advantage

Phase 02

Steady the Ship

90 days

Stabilisation. We remove the obvious leaks so the business can be operated on again.

  • Cash, stock, pricing and org chart interventions within the first quarter
  • Retention fixes on the highest-value cohorts first
  • Automated middle-management and admin overhead replacement where the economics support it
  • Centralised operating data on the Hive Operating System: one source of truth, not five
  • Weekly operating cadence embedded with named owners per workstream

Phase 03

Fix the Proposition

Months 3 to 18

Brand, product and go-to-market rebuilt, with the AI transformation team embedded in the operation.

  • Identity-driven customer journeys replacing transactional funnels
  • Tiered monetisation, ambassador and certification frameworks where the category allows
  • AI Staff deployed as named roles in the org chart, running continuous missions
  • Product and range rationalisation around the highest-margin, highest-loyalty customer
  • Go-to-market engine rebuilt on owned channels and first-party data

Parallel track

Asset optimisation.

Digital assets, inventory, content and data are rarely optimised in a business that has not had a pure-play operator running them. We fix that from week one.

Examples, depending on category: SKU rationalisation and algorithmic replenishment in retail. Catalogue digitisation and dynamic distribution in asset-heavy businesses. Content repurposing into owned channels, automated by the transformation team. Every optimisation compounds into the Phase 3 proposition rebuild.

Why this works

Four things traditional PE and consulting do not have.

We operate, we do not advise.

No straight consulting fees. We only take engagements where we have upside on the outcome, through ownership, carried interest, or equity tied to the sales and profit we help unlock.

Operators with scars.

Confetti. Sweatband.com. AffiliateFuture. IBG. M.i.h Jeans. UNTUCKit. Content, community and commerce was our specialism before it was a category — every play in the playbook is something the leadership has already done at scale.

A transformation team, not a slide deck.

Engineers, designers, prompt engineers and commercial operators show up and stay. The team runs on the Hive Operating System we built, so their output compounds inside the portfolio.

Our own AI IP.

HOS is the enterprise agentic operating system we built for ourselves. It treats knowledge as substrate, missions as encoded workflows, and AI Staff as citizens. It ships competitive advantage we do not hand to the next bidder.

Operator track record

Built, scaled and exited by the team.

Every outcome below was led by someone now on the CognitionHub leadership team.

  • Confetti

    One of Europe's first content, community and commerce operations. Andrew co-built it before the category had a name.

  • Sweatband.com

    £20m e-commerce. Sold to Dyaco in 2021.

  • AffiliateFuture

    UK affiliate marketing. Acquired by GlobalData.

  • IBG

    Digital advertising. IPO in 2000.

  • M.i.h Jeans

    Premium denim. $30m+ global sales.

  • UNTUCKit

    Menswear retail. International expansion.

Next step

Two ways to take this further.

For PE houses co-investing in deals where we take operator-of-record. For brand operators ready to share upside on a transformation. Different conversations, same playbook.

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