Jamie is one of those guests where the intelligence is obvious within about thirty seconds, but what makes her stand out is the way she carries it. Thoughtful, playful humility, high IQ and EQ, and none of the “look at me” energy that often comes with high performers.

What I found most interesting is that this was not a business built to sell. The founding team deliberately designed Truliant to stay small and manageable, and they were almost annoyed when the outside world started paying attention. They invested in marketing for hiring reasons and professionalism, then suddenly the inbox filled up and she’s basically thinking, what have we done.

The trajectory is a masterclass in niche selection. They picked a slice of pharmacovigilance that big firms were increasingly underweighting, then built a premium advisory around complex, high stakes decisions where clients often feel pain but cannot even define the real problem.

That is the kind of expertise business that travels fast through word of mouth, because the client is not buying hours, they are buying judgement.

The team model is another big takeaway. Six co founders can be a disaster, but in this case it was the advantage. They were genuinely complementary, globally distributed, and aligned enough to keep culture intact as they scaled, which is one of the hardest parts of any consulting business.

Jamie kept coming back to the idea that the “six together” was more powerful than you normally get with ten or even fifteen people, and you could feel that in how they operated.

The growth story is also very real. Consulting is feast and famine, the boat is small, the waves can be big, and you can fall off a cliff quickly if you stop selling. Their recalibration toward billing less and selling more was not just a cliché, they actually operationalised it, while using founders on projects as a trust signal clients could not get from bigger competitors.

Then the transaction arrives almost by surprise, but what impressed me is how adult the decision making was. They took meetings because they felt an obligation to shareholders and because you learn from every conversation, but they also understood the human reality of six founders trying to stay aligned.

Jamie’s phrase “radical transparency” is basically the only way that kind of structure survives, and it is probably why they got to the finish line together when so many founding teams fracture.

Post deal, the reality shifts. PE backed ownership brings a different operating system, different success metrics, more measurement, and a longer transformation than most founders expect. Jamie describes it as further transformation, not just integration, and you can tell she’s thinking clearly about what needs to change without losing what made the business special in the first place.

The best line near the end is the most human one. After she unpacked what the hell just happened, she realised she’s not done, even if she’s not sure she wants to build another company from scratch.

That’s the NexChapter sweet spot right there.