Work record / Stories

Building the bench instead of doing it alone

After nineteen years running Tellus largely solo, I built Common Ground as a group of principals.

Nineteen years of running Tellus mostly alone, across every function, came before Common Ground Ventures. I had the option to stay a solo principal and keep advising on deals as before.

Rather than keep selling one skill set, I put together an operating group of five principals. I went after partners whose careers were built in institutions and industries well outside construction, and I did it deliberately.

A single operator can only speak with credibility about the ground his own career has touched. For the group to solve real capital, brand and technology problems, it needed principals who had run those functions at scale. A generalist posing as an expert would not do.

Common Ground today is a principal-led operating group, with institutional, consumer-brand and technology track records on one bench. It presents as operators embedded in a client's business, not advisors working from a slide deck.

The quickest route to a wider offer is not learning five new fields yourself. Find partners who already hold real records in the fields you lack. It was also a trust decision. I chose to share credit and equity with people able to operate independently, because the combined group could serve a client better than any single one of us.

Story details

All stories · Work record