First riding

Regenerative Finance · Family · Leadership

My daughter's first riding lesson taught me more about business than any boardroom.

She gripped the reins. The horse stood still. She breathed. He walked. That's it. That's the whole lesson in capital allocation.

CityZeen · April 2026 · 4 min read · cityzeen.co

I was standing at the edge of the paddock, not coaching. Just watching. And in ten minutes, she understood something it took me twenty years in finance to grasp.

The horse was not being difficult. The horse was being honest. He was responding to what she was communicating, which was not "let's walk together." It was "I need to control this." The moment she let go of needing to control the outcome, he moved.

The executives I worry about most

Most of the capital allocators I sit with are smart, driven, and exhausted. They're not failing because they lack capability. They're failing because they are managing everything, every variable, every exit scenario, every contingency, and the system they're managing is a living thing that doesn't respond well to being managed.

Businesses with soul don't respond to control. Communities don't respond to control. Ecosystems don't respond to control. They respond to alignment.

The deal that kept slipping wasn't slipping because the numbers were wrong. It was slipping because everyone in the room was gripping the reins.

What alignment looks like in practice — Catalonia

There's a project we've been developing in Catalonia: water infrastructure and eco-village, ring-fenced as a hard asset. When we first presented it to traditional capital, the reaction was: "Too soft. Too complex. Too many stakeholders."

The investors who came in weren't passive — they were precise. They understood what the community needed, what the territory needed, and they structured their capital to work with those dynamics rather than override them.

The asset is performing. Not because the investors controlled it into performance. Because they created the conditions for it to perform, and then trusted the system.

My daughter got back on the horse. She stopped thinking about control. She was just there, with the horse, present. He walked immediately.

If you're tired of gripping the reins on a deal that has potential but won't move — a short conversation can help identify whether the structure is right or the energy is wrong. Join us

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