Our Process

In practice, Nautilus’s engagements typically start with a client seeking solutions to an urgent need. We love that! It presents the opportunity for us to showcase our capabilities and to begin earning our stripes toward becoming a trusted advisor. As that trust is earned, we get leveraged into longer-term strategic decision making processes. This is where we do our best work and have the most fun.

Lower middle-market owner-operators rarely have fiduciary or advisory boards to guide them along their journey. Instead, they rely on advice from spouses, friends, relatives or functional specialists, which is always well intended but not always fully informed.

By contrast, Nautilus’s partners have walked in the entrepreneur’s shoes. We’ve faced their challenges, experienced their successes and failures – and we have the scars to prove it. But along the way, we’ve also gained exposures and appreciations for what good really looks like and we bring those insights to clients with a wholistic, 360º perspective.

Our Mollusk

Nautiluses are considered living fossils, having existed for hundreds of millions of years with minimal changes to their basic anatomy. The cephalopod’s shell is known for its intricate spiral pattern formed by the creation of successively larger chambers as the animal matures. The nautilus always lives in its newest and largest chamber, but maintains links to prior chambers through a tube in which gas or water is pumped to regulate buoyancy. Perhaps not surprisingly, the nautilus is the longest-lived of the cephalopods.

It strikes us that the maturation of a nautilus is a wonderful metaphor for growing businesses. Through stages of responsible growth, a company’s foundation must evolve – adding capacity, protection, stability, balance and flexibility – all the while, maintaining ties to its past.

Nautilus Strategy Group

Business Evolved