Hook Grip Capital takes equity in exchange for operating work. One or two transactions a year. Never more than two running at the same time.
Hook Grip Capital Limited is a holding company. It is not a fund and it manages no outside money, so there is no portfolio to fill and no clock running against a sale.
We take a stake in a company and then work in it. The operating role is the payment: equity instead of fees, agreed in writing before the work starts, together with the terms on which we leave. Exit conditions are settled at entry.
Volume is deliberately low. One or two transactions a year, never more than two active at once. The sector follows the case.
Based in the UK and Switzerland. Companies elsewhere get looked at when the case justifies the travel.
Registered in England on 19 November 2024, company number 16089682, classified under SIC 64209 as a holding company.
Four conditions. A case that fails one of them is not a case we take, whatever else is true about it.
If nothing in the history of the relationship shows a position dropped because the facts said otherwise, nothing we bring later will land either. Every conflict we have had started here.
We move the needle where the idea holds and the machine does not stand up. Where the product itself is the problem, no amount of equity pays for the time.
The declared trade is making ideas sustainable. A business that lives on perpetual fundraising is a lottery ticket rather than a case for us.
A negative filter and not a negotiable one. We do not go in where effective control sits with an outside investor who appoints the management. That lesson has been paid for once already.
Equity vests against results agreed before the work starts, not against time served. The scope of the work and the number of days a week are written into the agreement, because work that is not defined expands.
There is a cash component wherever possible, even a token one. Someone who pays nothing listens to nothing.
Money sometimes goes in alongside the work. The amounts are small and the capital is never the main part of what we bring.
Two active engagements at most. A third is refused whatever its quality, because the ceiling is what protects the first two.
The events that end the arrangement are named before it begins:
Vested equity stays vested with no clawback. Either a liquidation formula agreed at the outset applies or tag along does. There is a deadlock mechanism as well, written while everyone still gets on, plus a monthly report. Silence from the numbers is always the first clause to go.
Bilitio Sagl runs fitness centres in Ticino Canton, the Italian speaking part of Switzerland. On the commercial register since 2018, share capital CHF 25,000. Small. It is presented here as small.
Hook Grip Capital took 25% on 28 February 2025, part work for equity and part cash. The management changed on the same day. The company was losing money at that point, with running costs nobody was measuring and daily decisions left to staff who had no way of checking the result.
The work was ordinary. Processes rewritten and hiring done against different criteria. A reporting line where there had not been one.
In 2026 it took on the client base of a nearby operator that had stopped trading. It trades at a profit now and is consolidating. Hook Grip Capital is still inside it, on strategic planning. Exit is not expected before year five.
The entry is public and can be checked: Bilitio Sagl, CHE-291.524.114, Camorino.
Hook Grip Capital is run by Rolando Alberti.
His work is at rolandoalberti.com and what he writes is at rolandoalberti.co.uk.
We read everything that arrives. We answer what we can act on.
If you are writing about a company, a first message is more useful than a deck. Four things:
If one of the four conditions above rules the case out, it rules it out. Saying so in the first message saves a fortnight.