We help private businesses define where they need to be over the next 12–18 months, identify the priorities that matter most, and shape the organisation required to deliver them.
Most businesses know roughly where they want to go. What they struggle with is the middle ground — the concrete 12-to-18-month plan that bridges today's reality with tomorrow's ambition. That is where we work.
We are not a conventional strategy consultancy. We are operators who spent seven years building a business from the ground up — making the same mistakes most private businesses make, learning from them, and ultimately creating something worth acquiring.
Our process produces one clear output: a strategic roadmap that tells a business exactly what it needs to achieve over the next 12 to 18 months, what to prioritise, how to organise, and how to allocate resources to make it happen.
When these things break, the result is usually the same: unhappiness, dysfunction, and overcapitalization.
Unclear roles across shareholders, boards, and executives slow decisions and weaken execution.
A long-term ambition without a defined mid-ground position leads to drift and wasted effort.
Without organisational and capital alignment, strategy remains theoretical.
We have built R1 billion+ businesses and know too well how costly these errors can be for businesses. And the more we work with companies across South Africa, the more apparent it becomes how universal these mistakes are.
Most businesses veer between two modes: long-term vision and day-to-day operations. They end us misallocating time and money. The vision is too distant to drive daily decisions. Daily operations are too reactive to reflect strategic intent.
What is almost always missing is the mid-ground — a clearly defined position at the 12-to-18-month mark that tells the business exactly what it must look like by then.
Income statement and balance sheet targets defined with enough specificity to anchor capital decisions.
The operating capabilities — people, systems, processes — that have to be built between now and then.
The strategic options the business should have unlocked — and the bets that earn the right to take them.
As active investors who have built, scaled, and sold substantial private businesses, Tim and Ant understand the link between operational reality and shareholder value. They bring a skin-in-the-game mindset to every engagement, challenging clients to make the decisions, build the capabilities, and create the clarity required to become genuinely investible businesses.
We work with private businesses typically doing between R100 million and R1.5 billion in revenue — businesses that are past the early stage but facing the real complexities of scale.
The catalyst is often a specific pressure point: the need to grow more deliberately, a capital allocation decision, an organisation that isn't keeping pace with the strategy, or shareholder and management expectations that have fallen out of alignment.
Zorros Partners has successfully advised and run multiple businesses across sectors, including healthcare, veterinary, logistics, manufacturing, wholesale, retail, and e-commerce.
Every engagement starts with a conversation. Tell us about your business and where you are trying to get to.
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