Senior people, actually present
The people you meet in the first conversation are the people who do the work. No bench swap after the mandate is signed.
The firm
Independent advisory built around small, senior teams that stay accountable for the outcome.
(01) Positioning
Built for the decision, not the deck
Most advisory work fails in the gap between the recommendation and the organisation that has to live with it. We built Maven Helm to close that gap.
The firm takes its name from two ideas held together. A maven is someone who has gone deep enough in a field to be genuinely useful rather than merely fluent. The helm is where judgement becomes direction, the point at which an opinion turns into a course the whole organisation will follow.
In practice that means we staff engagements with people who have run the function they are advising on, we write our conclusions in plain language, and we stay long enough to see whether we were right.
(02) Principles
How we hold ourselves
Measured against a baseline
We agree what good looks like before we start, and report against that number, including when it is uncomfortable.
Independent by design
No reseller margins, no implementation kickbacks. Our advice on a platform is worth something precisely because we do not sell it.
Capability left behind
Every engagement has a defined handover. Success is your team running it without us, not a renewal.
(03) Our base
Global reach, Colombo base
We work wherever the mandate is. Our headquarters sits on the Indian Ocean rim, inside a single working day of both Europe and Asia.
Maven Helm serves boards and executive teams across Asia, the Middle East, Europe and North America. Mandates are delivered on site, remotely, or both. We go where the decision is being made.
Headquartering in Colombo is deliberate. It keeps us within reach of most of the world’s business hours, gives us access to one of the region’s strongest engineering talent pools, and keeps our cost base honest, so our senior people stay on your engagement instead of being priced off it.
(04) Leadership
The people at the helm
Senior practitioners who have carried the responsibility they now advise on.
Ranga Perera
Managing Director
Ranga has spent his career where commercial strategy meets technology, and unusually, has worked from inside both.
He has held strategic positions within Sri Lanka’s banking sector, where progress is measured against regulation, legacy systems and a low tolerance for error, and within local and international IT companies, where it is measured against speed. Fluency on both sides of that divide is uncommon, and it shapes how Maven Helm works: the recommendation is written by someone who has had to deliver one.
Alongside that, he has worked closely with multinational companies and global giants including Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Kayak, Expedia, IFS Sweden, Samsung and Forbes magazine, where the benchmark is set by the best in the world rather than the best in the market.
Underpinning the practice is an MBA, an MSc in Digital Marketing and an MSc in Strategic Marketing, professional qualification through the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM-UK), and certification in Google Data Analytics, keeping the commercial case and the data beneath it in the same pair of hands.
(05) Contact
Let’s talk
Tell us what you are weighing up. We will tell you honestly whether we are the right people for it, and if we are not, who is.