Questions worth
asking first.

Perigon Partners is a strategy and sustainability consultancy that works with CEOs and Boards of mid-sized UK businesses. We build resilient, long-term plans that align action across the business, deliver visible momentum, and build confidence in the face of uncertainty.

Our core product is Sustainable Strategy: a long-range plan built with pioneering strategy and sustainability methods to hold up in the real world. We also take on standalone strategy and sustainability projects for clients at different starting points.

Perigon works primarily with mid-sized UK businesses, typically between £1m and £1bn in revenue or 100 to 2,000+ employees across any sector. CEOs and Boards often come to us at a point of change: new leadership, new ownership, M&A, IPO preparation, or a change or refresh of strategic direction.

We also work with sustainability leaders, responding to legal and regulatory changes, emerging risks, stakeholder demands, and to define and deliver commercially-sound ESG ambitions. Here we bring specific depth in financial services sustainability and climate transition planning.

Perigon Partners was founded by Emma Walford and Nick Walford, who both held executive roles at large UK banks before leaving to build a consultancy to tackle what they felt was broken: businesses forced to think in quarters when the game that matters is won over decades.

Emma leads as CEO. Nick leads advisory work. The founders are directly involved in every client engagement, not in name only, and remain focused on building the sort of consultancy they would actually have wanted to hire.

Yes. Perigon Partners is a certified B Corporation, meaning the firm meets independently verified standards of social and environmental performance.

In practice it means the same standards we help clients achieve are applied to how we run our own business. It also means we are legally required to consider the interests of all stakeholders, not just shareholders. We think that is the right way to run a professional services firm.

Both. Perigon Partners' primary proposition is integrated strategy: commercial and sustainability designed together. But Perigon Partners also works on core business strategy independently of sustainability where that is what the client needs, including market positioning, growth strategy, competitive response and M&A context. A focus on ESG Sustainability is not a prerequisite for working with us.

Both. Perigon Partners' primary proposition is integrated strategy: commercial and sustainability designed together. But Perigon Partners also works on ESG and sustainability independent of core business strategy where that is what the client needs, including double materiality assessments, climate transition plans, net zero targets, climate risk, ESG reporting, greenhouse gas emissions, and B Corp certification.

Yes. We take a strategy-first approach to ESG reporting, whilst ensuring compliance obligations are met pragmatically. We help clients understand what their current and future reporting obligations actually require, build the underlying strategy and data that make disclosures credible, and embed sustainability reporting into business as usual to maximise efficiency. Perigon Partners works on Taskforce for Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), UK Sustainability Reporting Standards (UK SRS), Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting (SECR) and Transition Plan Taskforce frameworks, enabling our clients to comply with FCA Listing Rules and UK Companies Act legislation. We are not an auditor and do not provide legal or accounting sign-off.

An end-to-end Sustainable Strategy engagement, which follows Perigon's signature Business in Command Method, typically takes between three and nine months. The most influential factors on timing are your firm's existing decision making pace and structure, which can often be linked to its size and complexity.

Other projects vary in length and are dependent on scope and on what is proportional to the firm's size and maturity. For example, a double materiality exercise can range from ten weeks to five months.

Perigon Partners works through five stages under the Business in Command method: understanding the current strategic position, clarifying long-term direction, stress-testing that direction against genuine uncertainty, building the integrated plan, then sharpening execution. Each stage involves information gathering, analysis and structured sessions with your leadership team.

The rhythm is designed around your firm's calendar. Perigon Partners does not operate an intensive on-site model; we are much lighter touch and fit into the way a functioning business already runs.

Senior people, throughout. Emma or Nick Walford, Perigon's founders, are involved in every Perigon Partners engagement. They are supported day-to-day by senior team members with lived business experience and specialists relevant to your brief.

The people you meet to scope the project are the people who run it.

Many Perigon Partners engagements are project-based, with a defined scope, deliverables and timeline. We also support clients through ongoing advisory and fractional relationships, which typically refresh annually. Neither is a requirement of or mandatory precursor to the other - what interests us is helping clients tackle interesting challenges, in whatever model makes most sense to them.

External challenge and having someone in the room whose job is to ask the uncomfortable questions raises the bar significantly on the quality and robustness of planning and decision making. An experienced consultancy like Perigon Partners will also radically improve the efficiency of the process, compressing time to defensible decision and short-circuiting months of internal deliberation.

If you choose strategy consultants like Perigon Partners who are actively involved in research and pioneering new methods, you will benefit from being at the leading edge of strategy setting, increasing your ability to outmaneuvre your competitors and whatever the environment throws at you.

That said: do not commission strategy work if the leadership team is not ready to act on what they find. Perigon Partners will say that plainly if it becomes apparent during scoping. A strategy process that produces a document and changes nothing is a waste of everyone's time and money.

Across a full Perigon Partners sustainable strategy engagement, clients typically receive: a long-range plan driving aligned action across all levels of the business; greater confidence with uncertainty, reducing reactivity and re-work when conditions shift; visible momentum supported by real clarity on which bets to place and which to stop; and a commercially-sound approach to sustainability integrated into the core plan.

Perigon Partners' client NPS is +91 (the measure of how likely they are to recommend us to others) and nearly half our revenue comes from repeat business. Our clients are also growing strongly, with an average 42% growth in total assets one to two years after first working with us. We take this as evidence that we are not only good to work with, but that our work delivers real-world, lasting results.

Business in Command is the Perigon Partners' proprietary method for building strategy in an uncertain world rather than one that assumes stable conditions. It has been built from decades of lived experience, combines pioneering strategy and sustainability techniques and runs through five stages: Broader Understanding, Long-term Moves, Uncertainty Planning, Single Narrative, and Living System.

The key practical difference: most strategy processes project from a narrow, financial view of current conditions and then ask what could go wrong. The Perigon Partners Business in Command method starts from an expansive understanding of how a business interacts with different forms of capital today and builds the plan around genuinely different plausible futures from the start. The result is a strategy that holds up when the environment shifts, rather than one that needs rewriting every eighteen months.

The Business in Command method also avoids the common strategy trap of “style over substance”. A nicely-worded set of themes that look and sound good but could apply to any competitor and leave every door ajar. It forces the tough decisions on what to stop and which opportunities to leave untouched. This stops the relitigation that can often happen after a strategy process that results in loss of focus and momentum.

Perigon's founders have experience hiring and working with most of the top tier consulting firms across multiple projects. There are key differences between the big firms' offerings and what they built Perigon to deliver, as well as the typical benefits that boutique firms offer such as better senior access and scale fit for mid-tier businesses.

Engagement model. Perigon Partners builds work plans around the rhythm of your business rather than inflexible project timings that suit a large consultancy's staffing model. Perigon Partners also provide a wide range of fractional and agency support that “typical” consulting models simply cannot cater to.

AI nativity. Large consultancies talk a lot about AI and are working hard to add AI into their existing processes. Perigon Partners has been designed and built on AI capabilities from the word go and we are quietly sitting at the leading edge of AI-native internal operations, client tools, and staffing models.

Real world experience. The Perigon Partners founders ran businesses and sat on ExCos and Boards long before advising them. Their first hand knowledge of what it takes to land change once the consultants have left the building has shaped the Perigon Partners offering. We focus less on long PowerPoints and more on how to build consensus, capabilities, and momentum.

Perigon Partners combines the senior access and directness of a boutique with structured proprietary methods, AI-native capabilities and genuine depth in both strategy and sustainability that are rare even in larger firms.

This gives Perigon Partners' clients access to more innovative, robust and embeddable processes and tools than can typically be found with boutique firms. Our expertise in commercial strategy also means that any sustainability-specific projects have more impact on, and are easier to integrate into, a client's core business than the outputs we have seen from boutique sustainability consultancies. In financial services, clients also say they find our lived sectoral experience valuable.

Perigon Partners is the strongest option for a specific client: a mid-sized UK business whose CEO or Board wants to create more aligned action and visible momentum in a way that is genuinely resilient to heightened uncertainty. We work best with businesses and individuals who are ambitious, big thinkers, and value our mixture of senior real-world experience and pioneering approaches. We are often sought out at inflection points in business ownership, leadership or planning.

Our work is highly applicable across most sectors, and can be relevant in larger businesses too. But we will always be honest in advance if we think a mandate is wrong for either side.

Perigon Partners does not publish fixed price lists because scope varies significantly by the size and complexity of both the challenge and the client. As a rough guide, most of our projects sit within the range of £30,000 to £200,000 plus VAT. Engagements are priced transparently up front, so clients can be confident about cost before contracts are signed.

Perigon Partners is not positioned as the lowest-cost option, but our operating model also means we are typically significantly cheaper than our larger competitors. The return on investment rests on the quality of the strategic decisions that result, not hours saved. If budget is a genuine constraint, raising that early allows Perigon Partners to scope something appropriate rather than waste time on both sides.

Perigon Partners' basis of pricing depends on the nature of the engagement. Typically we use fixed project fees linked to clear outputs. For fractional or ongoing advisory work where the major outputs are identified, prioritised and delivered during the course of a longer relationship, we will use day-rates as proxies for expected effort.

Contact Perigon Partners via the form on this site or at hello@perigonpartners.co.uk. One of the founders will respond directly within three working days.

The first step is a short scoping conversation, typically thirty minutes, to understand whether there is a fit and what challenges or opportunities you are looking to address. There is no charge for this, or the subsequent scoping and proposal work we will do if the fit is right. There is also no obligation on either side until contracts are signed - if we don't think it's a good fit from early conversations, we will say so clearly and encourage you to do the same.