Incubating Start to Scale, a New Advisory Firm

The Challenge

Wilgert Hart spent close to thirty years as a chief financial officer inside global agency networks, the person who turns a fast-growing company’s informal, gut-feel finances into the structure it needs to scale. After a career building finance functions for other people’s businesses, he set out to build his own: Start to Scale Financial Management, a fractional and interim CFO practice for Dutch scale-ups.

The expertise was never in question. The infrastructure was. An independent founder leaving a senior role starts with deep authority and almost nothing to put it in: no name worked through, no brand, no website, no working email, no place to produce the proposals and board documents a CFO advisory firm lives on. All of it has to exist before the first client conversation, and none of it is the work a finance leader is good at or wants to lose months to. The real risk for a founder of his calibre is launching small, with a thin generic identity that quietly undersells thirty years of standing.

This is the problem Stromy’s incubator package exists to solve. We help experts build their unfair advantage, and for an expert going independent that means a complete, modern digital foundation on day one, so the expertise is the first thing clients see.

Our Approach

Stromy stood up the entire foundation of the firm in a single compressed engagement, working outward from Wilgert’s own proposition.

A full brand identity. We built Start to Scale a complete Tier-1 identity from scratch: the name and positioning, a logo system, colour palette and typography, a sourced imagery library, and the everyday collateral a working firm needs, from document templates to letterhead, email signature and business cards, gathered in a brand book. The brief was specific and senior: plain board-room Dutch, calm and structured, no AI sheen and no brochure gloss. The result reads like a firm with a long history.

A bilingual website, generated from the brand. From that same brand data we built and deployed a website, Dutch by default with a one-click English version for an international network, so the identity and the site are one consistent system rather than two disconnected efforts. New domains and a working email round out a presence that was live-ready, not improvised.

A branded AI workspace. Finally, we set Wilgert up with his own AI workspace, a private brand-aware environment where he produces his own client-ready deliverables. Proposals and briefs come out carrying the firm’s identity and structure every time, so a one-person practice produces work with the polish of an established one. Stromy builds and runs the technology, and the founder keeps every minute of his time for clients and judgment.

The whole package moves from a first workshop to a market-ready firm in weeks, not the months a founder would otherwise spend assembling it piece by piece.

The Outcome

Wilgert goes to market with the presence of an established firm: a coherent brand, a bilingual site, a working email on his own domain, and a workspace that turns his thinking into board-grade documents on demand. The setup that usually eats a founder’s first quarter was compressed into weeks, and the part that actually wins clients, thirty years of CFO judgment, was free to lead from the first conversation.

Because the foundation is built on Stromy’s reusable infrastructure, it keeps growing with the firm. The same workspace that produces today’s proposals is the natural starting point for what comes next: an AI-enabled financial backbone of ERP and agentic workflows for the scaling companies Start to Scale advises. The incubator package gets a firm to market, and it is also where a longer technical partnership begins.