The interesting thing about Consello is not that Tom Brady works there. Nor is it that Serena Williams does, too. Celebrity attracts the eye, but it does not explain the machine. The real idea is hiding in the firm’s organization chart: put the people who advise a chief executive, find a successor, repair a technology program, defend against an activist, negotiate a transaction and invest in a mid-market company under one roof. Then ask that group to behave like operators, not a relay team passing the client from one specialist to another.
That is a compact description of an ambitious business. Founded in New York in 2022 by Declan Kelly, Consello has grown into an advisory and investing platform of roughly 170 people. Its footprint now stretches from New York, Miami and Atlanta to London, Dublin, Belfast and the Middle East. The service list has expanded with it: C-suite advice, management consulting, marketing, technology, executive search, investment banking, risk, sports and entertainment, plus a private-equity business called Consello Capital.
Most firms would treat those as separate neighborhoods. Consello’s premise is that a CEO’s hardest problems do not respect the zoning. A stalled AI program may be a technology problem, a talent problem and a governance problem at once. A growth plan may require a new commercial model, a different executive team and an acquisition. Consello sells coordination across those decisions.
The product is the room
Consello describes itself as an integrated platform, a phrase that can sound like brochure language until one looks at what the pieces do. Consello Solutions handles broad corporate problems with diagnostics and transformation support. Consello Growth works on profitability, go-to-market plans, new revenue models and partnerships. Consello Experience covers brand, marketing investment and organizational effectiveness. Consello Talent joins executive search with succession, assessment, board composition and leadership development.
The more technical edges are just as deliberate. Consello Tech deploys small teams around AI planning, software delivery and technical validation. Consello Financial provides investment-banking and M&A advice, shareholder value work and activist defense. A sports and entertainment practice serves teams, leagues, owners, athletes and investors across deals, capital, infrastructure, intellectual property and leadership. In early 2026, the acquisition of British threat-assessment firm Morpheus Risk added investigations, intelligence, security and crisis response.
The customer is therefore less an industry than a level of responsibility. Consello aims at CEOs, boards and executive teams in public and private companies, alongside investors, portfolio executives and sports stakeholders. The firm’s disclosed work includes advising Solstice Advanced Materials on its announced $14.5 billion acquisition of Element Solutions. Its wide-ranging relationship with Williams covers her interests in sports, retail and philanthropy. Those are different assignments, but both sit at the point where a consequential decision meets a network of possible actions.
Consello wants to be the call a CEO makes before deciding what kind of adviser is needed.
Advice with capital attached
Consello Capital makes the platform more than a consultancy with a broad menu. The investment arm targets high-potential mid-market businesses through buyouts, recapitalizations, growth equity and minority investments. It says it looks for companies where the wider Consello network can create a genuine advantage through business development, technology, talent or operational improvement.
The first disclosed investment was a majority stake in ProSearch in 2023. The company provides technology-enabled legal services and helps corporations and law firms manage litigation, regulatory and privacy work. Consello Capital acquired EHE Health, a nationwide provider of employer-based preventive care, in 2024. In 2025 it invested in CleanBoss, a cleaning and disinfectant-products business serving consumers and institutions.
These companies share no tidy product category. They do share the features of Consello’s stated hunting ground: established operations, room to scale and problems that could benefit from corporate introductions or specialist execution. In the private-equity model, the network is useful twice. It may help source and evaluate a deal before closing. Afterward, the same bench can recruit an executive, rethink a route to market or open a door to a large customer.
That loop is also Consello’s clearest business-model advantage. Advisory practices can earn fees from consulting, transactions and searches. The investment business seeks returns on capital. One side creates knowledge and relationships that can benefit the other, though the regulated broker-dealer and affiliated businesses have formal boundaries. Consello does not publish its fee schedule, fund economics, valuation or audited revenue, so the scale of each engine remains private.
The celebrity question
Brady, Williams, Pau Gasol and Gary Neville make Consello’s roster look unlike that of a conventional investment bank. The skeptical reading is obvious: famous athletes generate attention and introductions. The more useful reading is that elite sport is itself a complicated operating market. Teams and leagues face institutional investment, media fragmentation, global brands, stadium infrastructure, technology and intellectual-property questions. Athletes increasingly manage portfolios of companies, endorsements and philanthropic projects.
Consello has made that overlap a practice rather than a hospitality program. Its sports and entertainment team covers advisory and M&A, investing, content and IP, commercial partnerships and leadership development. The firm joined a new ownership group for England’s Salford City Football Club in 2025 alongside David Beckham, Neville, Lord Mervyn Davies and other investors. It has also announced a long-term partnership with golfer Shane Lowry.
There is a subtler cultural benefit. A firm that tells CEOs it understands performance under pressure can point to partners who spent careers being measured in public. That does not turn a champion into a banker, and Consello does not pretend it does. It makes athletic experience one type of operating knowledge inside a team that also includes former corporate chiefs, investors, technologists and advisers.
The famous names are the marquee. The harder-to-copy asset is the connective tissue behind them.
Where it sits in the market
Consello competes across several crowded fields at once. Teneo and FTI Consulting sell senior corporate advice. McKinsey, BCG, Bain and AlixPartners work on strategy and transformation. Banks and boutiques pursue M&A mandates. Korn Ferry and Russell Reynolds recruit executives. Private-equity firms promise operating resources alongside capital. A client can assemble any combination of them.
Consello’s difference is architectural. It asks the client to buy a coordinated table instead of a collection of chairs. Its public language repeatedly emphasizes “operators” and “outcomes,” positioning the firm against consultancies associated with recommendations that stop at a slide deck. The claim is plausible because many leaders have held the jobs they now advise: Wendy Clark ran global businesses at Dentsu and DDB; Mindy Grossman led WW International and HSN; technology partner Oscar Salazar helped found and engineer the early Uber platform.
But breadth creates its own test. Integration becomes harder as the number of specialties, offices and senior personalities grows. A boutique earns its premium through attention and coherence; a platform earns its reach through scale. Consello has to preserve both. The expansion into Ireland offers a miniature version of the playbook. It opened in 2024 by acquiring communications firm The Lanyon Group and leadership adviser Blue Lake High Performance Partners, starting with three offices and about 30 people rather than building each capability one hire at a time.
The practical takeaway
For a chief executive, Consello can be useful when the diagnosis is not settled or when several workstreams must move together: a transaction coupled with succession, a technology overhaul tied to organization design, or a growth problem that spans brand and commercial partnerships. For a mid-market owner, Consello Capital offers money packaged with a network and operating bench. For a sports organization or athlete, the offer stretches beyond representation toward capital, deals and business building.
The firm’s most transferable lesson is organizational. Companies often arrange services around their own professional categories. Consello arranges them around the customer’s decision. That is why risk can sit beside technology, talent beside banking, and a podcast beside private equity. “Grey Matter,” its interview series hosted by Kelly, is media, access and a public demonstration of the leadership network all at once.
Four years is too short to know whether the whole model compounds as neatly as the diagram suggests. It is long enough to see the position Consello wants: the boutique with enough specialists to handle the whole problem, and the platform personal enough that the senior people still answer the call. In a market full of firms selling expertise by the department, Consello is selling the room.