Case study: a start-up consultancy makes Aigis its first step
Before a consultancy advises founders, it reads: articles of association, funding conditions, term sheet, terms and conditions, data protection. How one consultancy builds Aigis into that process — and what changes for it.
A case study. The company is invented; what Aigis does in it describes its current functionality.
The consultancy supports companies from founding to market entry: legal form, financing, funding, sales. Twelve consultants, around forty mandates a year. Every mandate starts the same way — with a stack of documents written by others: the articles of association from the notary, the shareholders' agreement from the lawyer, the funding commitment with its conditions, the investor's term sheet, terms and conditions and the privacy notice for market entry, the first contracts with sales partners.
Each of these documents is careful on its own. Nobody has read them together. Six documents make fifteen pairs that would have to be read against each other; ten make forty-five. The funding commitment requires the registered office to stay in the region for three years; the term sheet allows the investor to move it. The terms and conditions promise an availability that the chosen hosting contract does not guarantee. The privacy notice names a storage location the provider does not commit to in that form. Until now, two people skimmed through it all in the first week of a mandate, and the kick-off with the founding team revolved around impressions.
Today Aigis is the first step of every mandate. The process:
- Every mandate gets a project in Aigis; the founding team's documents go in.
- In less than two hours the list is ready: contradictions with both citations and severity, obligations without an owner, open questions as ready-worded queries, pending decisions with the role that has to make them.
- The kick-off works through this list, open points first.
- Before every milestone — funding application, financing round, market entry — it is checked again. If a requirement changes, the old result counts as outdated until it has been checked again.
- Whatever the lawyer or tax adviser has to clarify goes to them as a PDF, with quotation and citation.
What has changed shows in three places. First, time: the review that used to fill the first week is ready on day one. The consultants' hours go into advice, not into searching. Second, the kick-off: it is shorter and more concrete. The founders leave the room with a list on which every point carries a name.
Third, the moment a risk becomes visible. The contradiction between funding condition and term sheet surfaces before anything is signed — not when the funding agency reclaims money. The promise in the terms and conditions surfaces before the first customer demands it. For a consultancy this is more than efficiency: every recommendation rests on a traceable citation, and the mandate is documented.
What Aigis does not do: decide. It recommends no option and replaces neither the consultancy nor the lawyer. Whether the office may be moved or the availability renegotiated is decided by the founding team and its advisers. Aigis makes sure the decision is taken consciously — and not overlooked.
A start-up consultancy sells judgement, not reading time. Aigis shifts the balance between the two towards what clients pay for.