The Founders' Room — commercial growth partner

We've built, scaled and sold a business like yours.
Now we help other founders do the same.

A commercial growth partner for founder-led FMCG and ecommerce brands — part consultant, part operator, part sounding board. We help you prioritise and execute, not just talk about it.

Book a call 15 minutes. No pitch.

Straight answer: is this for you?

We only work with a handful of founders at a time.

Not a fit

You want a 60-slide strategy deck
You need a big agency retainer with monthly reporting theatre
You're pre-launch and looking for a business plan

A fit

You run a founder-led consumer brand — FMCG, food & drink, nutrition, wellness or ecommerce
You're doing roughly £250k–£20m and have product-market fit, but scaling is the hard part
You want someone who's operated at your stage, not just advised on it

How we work together

Three ways in — pick the one that matches where you're at.

Focused

Growth diagnostic

A short, sharp review of one part of the business — ecommerce, CRM & retention, pricing, Amazon — with a clear list of what to fix and in what order.

Most common

Commercial growth partner

We sit alongside you month to month, in the detail — acquisition, retention, promotions, go-to-market — as an extra pair of operator hands and a sounding board.

Senior support

Fractional commercial leadership

Senior commercial leadership without the full-time hire — owning the growth agenda, retail vs DTC decisions and launch plans alongside your team.

Paul Simpson, co-founder of The Founders' Room

"We're not consultants who learned ecommerce. We're founders who lived it — sold it, and wear the P&L scars to prove it."

Paul Simpson & James Barthorpe, co-founders

We founded Food Circle — later Nutricircle — together, and grew it from a garage startup into one of the UK's largest surplus food ecommerce businesses, serving over 150,000 customer orders before it was acquired by Huddled Group PLC in 2024.

We then spent two years inside the PLC, integrating and growing the business — Paul as COO and Board Director, James as Managing Director of Nutricircle — before fully exiting in 2026. Along the way: Forbes 30 Under 30, retailer negotiations, supplier relationships, CRM programmes, P&Ls, launches — the lot.

It's why we'll never tell you to spend money just to make our numbers look good. Every pound of your budget gets treated like it's ours — because we know exactly what it costs to earn one, and what it feels like when the P&L doesn't add up.

Now we advise founders and work with great brands — brands in the same position we were in. The Founders' Room is us doing the work we know best, alongside a small number of founders at a time.

Let's have a conversation.

One message, straight to us — no forms that go into a queue. We reply personally, usually within a day. No pitch, no pressure.

We've built, scaled and sold a business like yours.Now we help other founders do the same.