There’s a quiet joke inside every operating company: those who can’t do, consult. Most of the time it’s a cheap shot. Some of the time it’s accurate. The shame is that the cheap shot survives because of how much of consulting deserves it.
We built IPAP to be the version of consulting we wished existed when we were on the client side of the table.
We’ve actually been you
IPAP was founded by Andrei Popov after thirty years of operating, not consulting. Before this firm, his roles included:
- General Partner at a venture fund
- Managing Director and CTO at a cross-border payments business
- CEO of one of Eastern Europe’s largest e-commerce platforms
- Chairman of the Supervisory Board at a non-banking financial institution
- Independent director at banks and clearing houses
- CIO and Management Board member at a leading regional bank
When engagements call for more hands, IPAP brings in operator-collaborators with similar track records — never a cast of MBAs and slide-makers. When we sit across from you, we’re not pattern-matching to a case-study library. We’re remembering the specific morning we made the call you’re about to make — and what we’d do differently.
We don’t milk contracts
Most consulting firms have a financial incentive to keep you dependent. We don’t. The default engagement is 10–12 weeks. If it needs to be shorter, we’ll tell you. If it needs to be longer, we’ll tell you that too — with the reason in plain English.
We work success-fee where we can
A success fee is a confidence signal in both directions. You only pay the upside if the outcome lands; we only get the upside if we did the work. Not every engagement supports it, but it’s where we’d rather start the conversation.
We find what you already own
Almost every transformation we’re called into has the answer somewhere in the building. The job is usually less about bringing expertise and more about unblocking the people who already have it and have been ignored for a year. That’s the engagement.
We’ve earned trust at the top
BCG. Raiffeisen Bank. Citi. Squirro. Plus several institutions whose names we’re not allowed to put on a website. The reference list is private; the references themselves answer when we ask.
The honest question: how much is staying stuck costing you right now? Three months? Six? The next round? A team you’d be sad to lose?
Tell us where you’re stuck. Worst case, we tell you we’re not the right fit and you’ve spent an email.