Stefano Maifreni is the founder and director of Eggcelerate, a London-based practice that acts as a fractional COO and CCO for B2B technology SMEs and start-ups.
He left corporate life to launch it in 2014, and Companies House records show its parent company, SteM Advisory, was incorporated on 2 September that year. Twelve years on, his work increasingly takes him into AI, DeepTech and quantum.
He tells Business Matters why strategy has to survive Monday morning and why automating a messy process only automates the inconsistency.
What do you currently do at Eggcelerate?
I usually get involved when a technology business is growing, but its operations have not quite caught up. Sales is doing one thing, Operations another, the founder is still involved in decisions that should not need them, and somebody has usually created a spreadsheet to hold it all together. None of this is unusual. It is what growth looks like before you put some structure around it.
At Eggcelerate, I work as a Fractional COO and CCO with B2B technology SMEs and start-ups. In practice, that can mean almost anything between the customer and the factory floor: go-to-market, sales, product, people, order management, production, systems, data, AI. Businesses do not experience problems in functional boxes, even if organisation charts do.
I have never been particularly interested in consulting from a distance. If we agree that something needs to change, I want to see what happens when we actually try to change it. The PowerPoint version of a business is always much tidier than the real one.
More recently, some of that work has taken me further into AI, DeepTech and quantum. For me, that is not a dramatic change of direction. I trained as an engineer, and I still love technology. The recurring challenge is the same: how do you get from an interesting capability to a product somebody wants, a commercial model that works and an organisation capable of delivering it repeatedly? That gap is where I tend to be useful.
What was the inspiration behind your business?
I can trace it back to one sentence.
Years ago, I was seconded to a corporate strategy team. We had spent months designing five new business units, and I loved the work. At the end, the project leader said, “Good. Now we need to find someone in the business to execute it.” My reaction was basically: what? After all this work, I want to do it.
Strategy can be intellectually fascinating, but somebody eventually has to make it survive Monday morning.
Later I met more and more small business owners who had paid for advice and were still left asking the same question: fine, but who is going to make this happen? A large company can absorb a report, create a programme, appoint a team and hold six steering committees. An SME cannot, and should not, work like that. It needs enough structure to grow without importing all the bureaucracy of a corporate.
There was a personal side too. By the time I started Eggcelerate in 2014, I was asking myself what kind of work I actually wanted to spend my time doing. My wife and I had many conversations about it because the risk was ours, not mine. Her support mattered enormously.
Who do you admire?
I do not really have business heroes. I can admire what someone has done without wanting to make that person a model for everything else.
The one name I have given consistently, though, is Alex Zanardi. His death this year hit me because I had used his story for years when talking about resilience.
He was a remarkable racing driver, but that is not why I admired him most. After losing both legs in the Lausitzring accident in 2001, he came back to motor racing and later became a multiple Paralympic gold medallist in handcycling, winning four golds across the London 2012 and Rio 2016 Games.
What I found extraordinary was not simply that he “came back”. He found another way forward. He adapted to a reality he had not chosen, remained fiercely competitive and, from everything I saw of him, kept his humour too.
Zanardi was an extreme reminder that circumstances can tear up the plan. What matters then is what you build next.
Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently?
I would have started earlier.
For a long time, I waited to feel ready. One more role, one more piece of experience, a bit more security and then perhaps I would make the move. The problem was not the advice I grew up with, that a good career meant stability and progression. The problem was that I turned “be sensible” into “remove all uncertainty before you act”. You cannot.
Eventually I moved countries, left corporate life and started Eggcelerate. None of those decisions arrived with the level of certainty I had been waiting for.
I would probably also be a little kinder to the person who started the business. In the early days, I could turn a late payment, a lost opportunity or a quiet month into a judgement on the whole venture. When it is your company, the distance between “this went badly” and “I am doing badly” can become dangerously short.
These days I quite like putting myself back in the position of not knowing, whether that is a new technology, theatre or Japanese Jiu-Jitsu. It has taken me a while to learn this, but being ready is overrated.
What defines your way of doing business?
I tend to ask annoying questions.
A client may tell me they have a sales problem and I will want to know why, then why again. Perhaps the proposition is unclear, the wrong customers are being targeted, Product is building what the loudest customer asks for, or Operations cannot deliver what has already been sold. Businesses are systems. Problems have an irritating habit of appearing somewhere other than where they started.
That is also why I am wary of fashionable solutions. AI is the obvious example right now. I am a big believer in it and use it myself, but “we need AI” is not a business problem. If five people perform the same process in five different ways, automating it does not suddenly make the process good. You may have automated the inconsistency.
I also think an external person has to earn the right to disagree. If I say I think we are solving the wrong problem, I should be prepared to get into the detail, help work out the right one, and then we do something. After that, somebody needs to own the action, something needs to change, and we need to find out whether it worked.
Ideally, over time, the client needs me less. I consider that a feature, not a flaw.
What advice would you give to someone starting out?
First, make sure somebody other than you cares about the problem you are solving. Founders can become very attached to their product, particularly when it is technically clever. The customer has not lived through the development journey and does not owe the product any affection. Talk to them early, preferably before you have built too much.
Cash is another one. You can have a good order book, happy customers and plenty of opportunities, and still wonder why there is so little money in the bank. I have been there. A sale is great, but when the customer pays, how much you have spent to deliver it and what happens in the meantime matter just as much.
Do not assume that doing everything yourself is something to be proud of forever. If every unusual decision still comes back to you, or half the company’s history lives in your head, you have not made yourself indispensable. You have made it difficult for the business to grow without you.
The same applies to technology. AI has made it incredibly easy to automate things, which also makes it easier to automate things we probably should not. Before automating a process, I like a very simple test: if a new employee joined tomorrow, could they follow it without somebody sitting next to them explaining all the unwritten rules? If not, I would fix that first.
And keep something outside the business, something you enjoy, something you are bad at, ideally both. Perspective is not time wasted. Often, it is what lets you come back and see the problem properly.
