About us
Steven Wilkinson
I am the founder and managing director of Good & Prosper, a private advisory and investment company founded in 1998, based in Germany and Ireland and active in both the USA and Europe.
In my own words
I have spent the last three decades minding my own business and running my own balance sheet. I have always seen myself as a supporter and advisor to operating business leaders mostly from the position of board member, often chairman. Since 2020 I have increasingly found myself acting as a thinking partner and strategic advisor to the owners of private businesses, outside of a board function, helping them navigate critical strategic issues. My perspective is that of a value investor with a genuine love of small and mid-sized companies and the people who run them.
My background includes 35 years of involvement in the international capital markets and investment management, which allows me to take an analytical approach based on the financial realities of the business and its model.
I am a founding member of the Small Giants Community — companies that choose to be great instead of big — where I have watched, at close range, owners build extraordinary businesses without the usual compromises. Much of what I believe about culture and ownership I learned from them.
By watching at close hand what goes wrong with companies, you learn a great deal about what goes right. Good & Prosper is where I put that to use: an advisory practice run from Valley in Bavaria, thinking and talking with owners about strategy, leadership, culture and the numbers underneath all three.
I am an incurable bibliophile and consummate connector of people and ideas as well as a committed student of economic history. I am a dedicated free market libertarian with a strong faith grounding. I publish regular essays under the title of Pitchfork Papers on Substack and I am a frequent guest on podcasts. I recently co-founded the Good Books Academy, with my daughter Georgina, to teach financial fluency to business owners. I have been married to Britta — the mother of our four children — for almost thirty years.
The mark
Good & Prosper explained
Three rings, overlapping, none of them complete on its own.
Circumambulation is one of the older habits of thought: the walk taken around a thing rather than at it, on the understanding that a single approach shows you a single face. Monks built cloisters to do it in. I find it the honest description of this work. Numbers and words are not rival trades but two accounts of one situation — the ledger tells you what a company is doing and the people in it tell you why, and neither gives up everything on a first pass. So one goes round again. That good and prosperous were ever thought alternatives strikes me as a fairly modern confusion, and the mark is drawn to disagree with it.
- ~€1bn
- Assets under management in structures co-created with partners since 2002.
- 8
- Substantial transactions completed since 2002 across six sectors
- 35 yrs
- Advising and supporting business owners at critical inflection points, inside and outside of boards.
- 1st
- Publicly listed German holding for distressed mid-market companies.
The team
Deliberately small.
Whilst the advice is delivered by me in person, my ability to be fully present is only possible with the support of an outstanding team providing the organisational, research and communication resources day-in, day-out.
-
Steven Wilkinson
Founder
-
Britta Wilkinson
Head of Operations
-
Laila Skoczylas Fiszer
Office Manager · Project Manager & Head of AI Integration
-
Georgina Wilkinson
Business Development · Co-Founder, Good Books Academy
I read a lot…
I was once asked why I read as much as I do, and I had to think about that for a while. I now believe that after many years of advising, that I read primarily to have as deep a pool as possible of context, concepts, stories, analogies, metaphors and insights for those I serve as an advisor or leader. I read so much, primarily so that you don’t have to.
I take great pleasure in sharing valuable and interesting resources — books, essays, conversations — and have created this Reading Room for you to peruse and dip into as the fancy takes you.
“I recommend him without reservation to other business friends.”
“I worked closely with Steven to develop a clear and emotionally connecting Vision Statement for a fifty-year old company of which I am one of the founders and active in today. During this process, Steven provided critically important help by asking perceptive and important questions, using his very clear and eloquent writing, friendly and thoughtful encouragement and his strong commitment to organizations that place people first and are concerned about ethical management.”