Carve-outs and separations
Establish authority, preserve operating continuity and create a governable standalone structure.
Special Adviser — Special Situations
Independent judgement when the presenting problem does not fit the organisation chart.
Thirteen years of judicial experience applied to capital, governance, operations, institutional behaviour, risk and stakeholder incentives.
Establish reality where competing professional narratives have produced paralysis.
What others observed Curtis A. Carver Jr. records that Steven spearheaded efforts at a national level to unify the government
and was a strategic visionary of the highest order
.Public LinkedIn recommendation · Iraq colleague · 2012
Steven earns trust across fragmented authority, distinguishes evidence from competing narratives and converts ambiguity into a decision the principal can execute.
- Scrutinise the evidenceSeparate fact, inference, assertion and aspiration.
- Map authority and incentivesReveal control, constraints and leverage.
- Recover optionalityDetermine what can still be protected, recovered and executed.
Formation: thirteen years of judicial decision-making applied across capital, governance, operations, risk and institutional behaviour, supported by primary documentation of temporary national-level exercise command.
Relevant mandate contexts
Transaction and sovereign contexts
Steven’s experience is relevant to carve-outs, buy-and-build platforms and cross-border special situations where operating integration, capital protection, geopolitical and sovereign risk, and senior-government engagement must be considered together.
Buy-and-build and platform formation
Test the integration thesis and align acquired capability, capital, governance, people and execution.
Cross-border and sovereign risk
Assess political, institutional and stakeholder conditions, informed by direct engagement at prime-ministerial, presidential, ministerial and senior-command level.
Judicial formation
Thirteen years as President of Courts Martial developed an exceptionally disciplined approach to evidence, competing accounts, procedural fairness and decisions under consequence.
The appointment spanned the reform effective from 31 October 2009. Before that reform, the President presided with the Judge Advocate responsible for law and procedure. Under the standing Court Martial, the Judge Advocate presides and gives binding legal directions; the President of the Board chairs verdict deliberations, protects their integrity and each member’s equal voice, announces the verdict, participates in sentencing and formally pronounces sentence. The Board alone decides guilt. Sentence is decided jointly with the Judge Advocate, who chairs the sentencing deliberation and holds a casting vote. This is judicial experience, not a claim to have been a Judge Advocate, lawyer or civilian judge.
Steven applies that discipline commercially to separate fact from assertion, expose where authority and incentives conflict, and give Chairs, CEOs and sponsors a defensible basis for action.
Evidence before decisionAnonymised first-hand example
Preparation began before the Court sat.
During an intensive sitting week, a hearing day could contain two or three cases. Mondays, Wednesdays, evenings and other free periods were often devoted to examining prosecution and defence bundles. The purpose was to identify what appeared agreed and what required testing; verdicts remained based solely upon evidence presented in court.
Steven applies the same discipline commercially. Board papers, contracts, accounts, legal advice and stakeholder narratives are compared to establish what is genuinely known, where accounts diverge and which uncertainties must be resolved before capital or authority is committed.
Judgement under constraint
In one Court Martial, a serviceman who had intervened to end a public-order fight had been charged alongside those responsible and pleaded guilty. The plea established guilt; it did not make every participant morally or operationally equivalent. Steven’s account records that he argued against detention or a substantive fine. The Court imposed a nominal £1 fine with no detention; those responsible for the fighting received loss of pay and four weeks’ military detention.
The case illustrates a recurring discipline: a formal classification may be legally valid while still failing to describe the operational territory. Good judgement respects the boundary of law without surrendering proportionality, context or responsibility.
Purpose
Establish what is actually happening, what remains recoverable, where authority and incentives sit, what should be protected and which interventions remain executable.
The work begins before a preferred solution is selected. Judicial experience contributes evidential discipline and independence; executive and principal experience supply the capacity to test advice against capital, operating reality and the practical limits of implementation.
The task is to distinguish documentary fact from assertion, identify unsupported narratives and design a sequence that preserves the greatest legitimate optionality.
Typical engagements
Concrete questions for boards, sponsors and private-equity operating partners.
- Test an investment thesis against operating evidence under pressure
- Diagnose portfolio-company underperformance
- Assess exit readiness and recoverable-value constraints
- Review post-deal integration failure
- Challenge valuation, capital-structure and recovery assumptions
- Provide embedded post-acquisition commercial and management assurance
The WFEL record provides a documented example of an embedded post-MBO commercial appointment; the additional sponsor-assurance remit remains separately classified as Steven’s first-hand account. Review the evidence boundary →
Decision sequence
Cross-domain integration
Professional maps need not agree to be decision-useful.
Lawyers, accountants, bankers, engineers, operators and security specialists examine different abstractions of the same territory. A fusion-cell approach preserves each specialist conclusion while identifying interdependencies, conflicting assumptions and consequences that sit between professional disciplines.
The objective is not consensus. It is an integrated decision picture from which the principal can act with uncertainties and trade-offs still visible.