For portfolio professionalsEvery stage. Everywhere.
Two routes, one conviction.
Both went portfolio at thirty-nine. Two continents apart.
Same age, entirely different road, and the same conclusion at the end of it: that a portfolio career is not a fallback but the most alive, dynamic, most purposeful, most commercially intelligent way to work.
Neither spent all their working life in the country they were born in. They were remaking themselves long before anybody called it a portfolio, which is possibly why the idea of remaking a career holds no terror for either of them.
Both have remade themselves once already. A career is a smaller ask.
Co-founder · the growth lens
Zarir (Zed) Vakil
Advise. Navigate. Inspire.
LondonKenyan-born, of British Parsi heritage, in the UK since he was thirteen and London ever since.
Zed is the growth lens to Mike’s agility lens, and he has learned business from all three seats: operator, investor and director. A corporate decade at H. Samuel plc, BAT Industries plc and GKN plc came first, then the other side of the table — co-founding the venture capital firm DCD London & Mutual plc, with the next decade judging which businesses deserved founding, backing, building and exiting a portfolio at an average five times return.
The crossing came in 2001, and by 2009 the portfolio was the practice rather than the sideline: growth mandates, long fractional and interim tenures, a change programme at GSK, a turnaround at StepJockey, eight years as a non-executive director of WRLD Inc. through a twenty-million-dollar Series B. Operator, investor and director are not three jobs stacked on a CV. They are deep strokes crossing at a centre, and the centre is him.
Zed now runs his own business growth practice, is a Portfolio CEO and
Fractional Director, a NED and a certified peer forum leader. A 
.
Co-founder · the agility lens
Mike Richardson
Agility, Peer Power & Collective Intelligence.
Los AngelesEnglish originally, American now, twenty-five years in Southern California.
Mike also went portfolio at age thirty-nine, before the phrase had currency and long before anyone was writing manifestos about it. The corporate chapters came first: oil and gas with Shell International, then aerospace with Dowty Aerospace/Tube Investments PLC, then a run as serial CEO of technology companies, culminating in leading the aerospace division of a British public company, Spirent PLC.
Then came the crossing. Rather than the next rung, he built a portfolio around a conviction: that peer power, collective intelligence and agility are what actually move companies, organisations and leaders, and that facilitating them is a craft in its own right. Twenty-five years of it, with CEOs and executives from startups to global corporations, plus authoring books and keynote speaking globally, evolving leading-edge frameworks on agility along the way. He discovered his greatest passion is facilitating peer forums, which he has been doing for over two decades. Co-founding PXO turned that craft toward portfolio professionals themselves.
Mike now runs his own agility practice, is a serial CEO turned
facilitator, an author on agility and a certified peer forum leader. A .
MikeLos Angeles
ZedLondon
The Crossing
One conversation,
eight hours apart.
What the UK calls a NED, the US calls a board member. What one market calls a plural career, another calls a slash career. That is not a translation problem. It is the reason the category stayed invisible for a decade, because the people inside it could not recognise each other across a border. One letter fixes it, and a movement making that argument had better be able to make it on both sides of the Atlantic, in the vocabulary each side actually uses.
To your version of success
Out of the work, a map.
Three years of incepting and now co-facilitating Portfolio Peer Forums, Mike and Zed's own journeys, experiences, intellectual property and thought leadership, have helped them reach their passionate purposes. That, in helping others find their own version of success, is their own success fulfilled.
That has led to the creation of assets and resources specifically designed to this end. At the heart of this is the Success Model: a map of the portfolio career's outer journey of role and inner journey of soul.
It is what the Portfolio Career Road Atlas is built on, what the
Check reads against, and where the Growth
Navigator will take you.