CHIB LTD
We advise leadership teams on structure, succession, and the commercial questions that do not fit neatly into a slide deck.
Begin a correspondenceCHIB LTD exists for organisations that have outgrown informal advice. When ownership, regulation, or growth compresses the room for improvisation, leadership needs a counterpart who can hold the whole picture without selling a product line.
We work as an independent advisory practice. Our work is written, structured, and accountable. Engagements are scoped in plain language. Deliverables are documents that boards can circulate, challenge, and keep—not workshops that evaporate by Monday.
From Cedar House on Vine Lane in Hillingdon, we serve privately held companies, professional partnerships, and mid-market groups navigating transitions that alter control, capital, or operating model. Distance is irrelevant; discipline is not.
Clients come to us when internal teams are capable but conflicted, when external counsel is fragmented across specialties, or when a founder needs a single voice who will say what the room will not.
“Advice that cannot be written down was never advice—it was atmosphere.”
We do not advertise a catalogue of services. The practice concentrates where judgement, documentation, and commercial reality meet. The following are the recurring theatres of work—not packages, but patterns we recognise.
Holding companies, operating subsidiaries, shareholder agreements, and the informal understandings that sit beside them. We map who can decide what, under which instruments, and what breaks when someone leaves, sells, or disagrees.
Engagements often begin with a reconstruction: minutes, side letters, email trails, and the stories people tell about “how things work here.” From that reconstruction we draft recommendations the board can adopt, amend, or reject with eyes open.
Market entry, exit, partnership, and capital allocation decisions that require more than a financial model. We stress-test assumptions, surface conflicts of interest, and frame options so that a vote has meaning.
When a board is new, contested, or simply tired, process becomes either a shield or a trap. We help design meeting rhythms, information rights, and escalation paths that match the organisation’s actual risk—not a template copied from another sector.
Correspondence remains open at info@chib-ltd.online for preliminary questions before a formal mandate is discussed.
“A board that cannot name its next three decisions is already behind them.”
Engagements follow a spine—sequential, auditable, and deliberately unspectacular. Each stage produces a written artefact before the next begins.
You write. We reply with a short reading of the situation, what we would need to see, and whether the matter sits inside our practice. No discovery call theatre—clarity first.
Typical turnaround: several working days. Contact: info@chib-ltd.online
If we proceed, we issue a memorandum: purpose, boundaries, materials required, timelines, fees, and what success looks like in documentary terms. You amend until it is accurate.
Nothing begins until both sides countersign the scope.
We gather the record: filings, contracts, board packs, and conversations with the people who carry institutional memory. Interviews are structured; notes are shared back for correction.
Confidentiality is contractual, not ornamental.
Findings and options arrive as a working draft. You mark it. We revise. The goal is a document the board can own—not a performance of expertise.
Revision rounds are built into the mandate.
We present when asked, answer challenges, and leave a final pack: recommendations, open risks, and recommended next instruments. The engagement closes with a short letter of record.
Follow-on work is optional and separately scoped.
“We prefer a thin file that tells the truth to a thick one that flatters the client.”
Long-form notes we circulate to clients and peers. These are not blog posts; they are essays on recurring problems of corporate life.
Most shareholder agreements fail not because the drafting is incompetent, but because the parties treat the document as a trophy of formation rather than a working instrument. By the third year, nobody can find the latest version. By the fifth, a director cites a clause that was never signed.
We recommend an annual “instrument audit”: a short session in which the board confirms which agreements are live, which side letters still bind, and which oral understandings have become dangerous folklore. The output is a one-page schedule—dull, invaluable.
Where disputes are already visible, the audit becomes forensic. Dates matter. Signatures matter. The absence of a deed of adherence often explains more than any narrative of bad faith. If your group has more than two classes of equity and no living schedule of rights, write to us at info@chib-ltd.online before the next capital event hardens the ambiguity.
The practice will not rewrite your agreement for sport. We will tell you whether the paper still describes the company you actually run.
Succession planning collapses when it becomes a branding exercise. Announce a “next generation of leadership,” photograph the hand-over, and leave the real powers—bank mandates, key-person clauses, customer relationships—untouched. The organisation then discovers, at the worst moment, that the title moved but the authority did not.
A serious plan names dates, instruments, and contingencies. Who holds the casting vote if the founder is incapacitated? Which customers must be introduced formally? Which suppliers will renegotiate the day the letterhead changes? These questions belong in a private memorandum, not a press release.
CHIB LTD drafts succession packs that a solicitor can execute and a bank can recognise. We also draft the conversation the board is avoiding: the difference between mentoring and control, between legacy and liability.
If your timeline is measured in months rather than years, say so plainly. Ambition without a calendar is merely hope.
Boards drown in paper when management confuses completeness with clarity. A three-hundred-page pack is not diligence; it is a transfer of risk onto directors who cannot possibly have read it. We advise a discipline of decision papers: one question, three options, residual risk, and a recommended vote—supported by appendices that are optional, not obligatory.
Secretaries and chairs who adopt this form find meetings shorten and minutes improve. Dissent becomes visible rather than muttered. The practice has observed that organisations with cleaner papers also tend to have cleaner escalations when something goes wrong.
We will not design your pack for free. We will, however, send a specimen decision paper to any serious correspondent who writes from a company email to info@chib-ltd.online with a one-paragraph description of the next contested vote.
Advisory firms advertise independence while selling adjacent products. The conflict is structural. CHIB LTD declines implementation mandates that would make us judge and vendor of the same recommendation. If we counsel a restructure, we do not then staff the project office.
Clients sometimes find this inconvenient. They want one throat to choke. We prefer one conscience that remains free to revise its view when the facts change. That freedom is why our letters end with invitations to challenge, not with closed proposals.
Cedar House remains open to correspondence that tests this claim. Write carefully. We read carefully.
Defined terms we use internally. They are not slogans; they are constraints.
From the desk of the correspondent
CHIB LTD
Cedar House, Vine Lane
Hillingdon
info@chib-ltd.online