Independent Consultant
Iris Marlow.
Strategy & Operations, late-stage scale-ups.
About
I help good teams become great companies.
Twelve years in operations across consumer tech, fintech, and climate. I spend my time in the messy middle, between strategy that looks clean on a slide and the daily work that actually gets things shipped. Three founders, two boards, one auditor; the same problems wearing different hats.
The work that pays the bills is interim Chief of Staff and operating-partner engagements: 3 to 6 months, embedded in the executive team, fixing the thing that's slowing everything else down. The work I love is the long lunch after, when the founder asks the question they couldn't ask in the meeting.
Strategy isn't a deck. It's the third email of the week that says "this isn't what we agreed."
Recent work
Selected engagements.
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2025Series C climate-tech (Berlin)Interim Chief of Staff during a CEO transition. Rebuilt the operating cadence, rationalised the OKR system, and shipped a board-ready 18-month plan in eleven weeks.
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2024Consumer fintech (London)Operating-partner engagement post-Series B. Closed the EU expansion roadmap, hired the first VP of Operations, and built the runway model the team still uses.
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2023B2B SaaS, profitable (London)Three-month sprint with the founding team to restructure the leadership group ahead of a £40m fundraise. Hire-and-fire decisions, not theory.
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2022Climate accelerator (remote)Built and ran the operating curriculum for the cohort. Twelve founders, eight months, real outcomes.
Writing
Things I've written down.
Get in touch
I take on three engagements a year.
If you're a founder or operator at a late-stage scale-up and something in here resonates, send me a note. I read everything and I reply within a week.