Advising founders, startups, agencies and organisations, while coaching those working in the creative and impact sectors.
Who I work with...
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Accelerator programmes
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Incubators
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Startup founders
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Agencies & studios
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In-house marketing and comms teams
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Impact businesses & organisations
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Leadership teams
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Creative & campaigns professionals
Supporting as:
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Entrepreneur in Residence
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Accelerator mentor
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Founder & career coach
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Senior Advisor & Non-Exec
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Keynote speaker
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Workshop facilitator
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Advisory board panelist
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Judge and pitch panelist
Career highlights:
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Founded & scaled global creative agency with 20x exit
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Board Non-Exec & Chair
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Entrepreneur in Residence with Virgin StartUp, NatWest & UNREST
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Creative Director, United Nations
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Built Weber Shandwick's EMEA creative studio
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TEDx speaker, selected by TED Editors
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Published Author of 'Founder Therapy'
Founder Mentor & Entrepreneur in Residence
Building a business takes more than a great idea. It requires clarity of vision, resilience, commercial thinking and the ability to communicate your value at every stage of growth. Having founded, scaled and exited an award-winning agency, I work alongside founders and accelerators as a trusted mentor and strategic partner.
I've supported startup cohorts through organisations including Virgin StartUp, UNREST and NatWest Business, helping founders navigate the challenges of building and growing successful ventures.
Whether working with early-stage startups, scale-ups or purpose-driven businesses, I help founders strengthen their strategy, sharpen their proposition and build organisations designed for sustainable, long-term growth.
Investor Pitch Development
Develop compelling investor narratives that clearly communicate your vision, market opportunity and commercial potential. Refine your pitch deck, storytelling and delivery to inspire confidence and secure investment.
Sustainable & Scaleable Business Planning
Build a business designed for long-term success. Together, we'll strengthen your strategy, operating model and growth plan, balancing commercial ambition with sustainable, scalable foundations.
Brand Development
Create a distinctive brand that people believe in. From positioning and purpose to messaging and identity, develop a brand that stands apart and resonates with customers, partners and investors.
Communications & Marketing
Turn strategy into visibility. Develop communications and marketing that build awareness, strengthen reputation and create meaningful engagement, helping your business attract customers, talent, partners and investment.
Personal Career Coaching
Flexible sessions are tailored to support professionals working across creative, communications and impact-driven industries, including Advertising, PR, Marketing, Design, Film, Video, Games, as well as Campaigns & Policy Change.
I bring together first-hand leadership experience with extensive research into neuroscience, psychology, stress management and human behaviour. My coaching helps professionals develop greater self-awareness, lead with confidence, navigate uncertainty and build meaningful, sustainable careers grounded in empathy, purpose and long-term personal growth.
Whether you're looking to accelerate your career, strengthen your leadership, navigate change or unlock your next opportunity, each session is shaped around your goals and challenges.
Creative Direction
These sessions focus on ensuring your work resonates with audiences and delivers lasting commercial results. Together we guide creative direction, helping projects align ambition and vision with platforms, trends, and audience expectations - ultimately increasing pitch success, impact, and return on investment.
Leadership & Team Culture
These sessions focus on leadership development within the creative industries, including team building dynamics, communication styles and stakeholder management. They also guide conflict resolution, critical decision making and workload prioritisation.
Professional Flow
These sessions focus on time and productivity management, confidence and stepping into yourself, stress management, wellbeing and resilience training.
Career Strategy & Growth
These sessions support your trajectory and speed of progression, focusing on personal brand positioning, networking and career planning. They also guide remuneration strategy, negotiation preparation, finance projections, cash flow management and contract development.
Senior Advisory Services
Clarity:
Strategic Direction & Growth
I help agencies and studios set clear, practical, and future-proof paths for growth.
I work on shaping your positioning, projections, defining ideal clients, and improving conversion and pitch wins - all while helping to support confident decisions about hiring, suppliers, partners, investment, and expansion.
The focus is on creating strategies and workflows that allow your business to scale sustainably without wastage, and stay creatively ambitious in a growingly fragmented and agile market.
Culture:
People & Leadership Dev
I strengthen your foundations, helping you attract and retain the right talent, build teams that communicate and collaborate effectively, and foster a culture that supports professional development, personal wellbeing, and a balance of creativity and commercial impact.
Using Myers-Briggs and Insights, I also clarify values and reveal how individuals think, communicate, and perform.
Craft:
Creative Direction & Operations
I ensure your work resonates with audiences and drives lasting commercial impact.
Together we streamline your processes and AI-driven workflows to improve efficiency and scalability, removing bottlenecks, ensuring projects are cost-effective, and optimising how you manage third-party supplier and partner proposals, pitches, and contracts.
I also guide creative direction, helping projects align ambition and vision with platform, trends, and audience expectations - increasing pitch wins, impact and return on investment.
Telling stories & building companies that change the world.
For over two decades, Mike has crafted stories and built companies at the intersection of culture, identity and creativity.
He understands how stories move people - creating resonant narratives with emotional depth and commercial reach that don’t just entertain, but define and drive cultural conversation and social impact.
Working across advertising, film and games, Mike is an award-winning director, writer & creative consultant, helping teams and crews pitch, win and create work rooted in emotion, identity and culture that keeps pace with evolving audience behaviours.
He also works as a senior advisor to founders, startups, agencies and organisations, while coaching those working in the creative and impact sectors.
An Impact-Driven Career
In 2015, Mike founded, scaled and has since exited Shape History, the award-winning social impact communications agency, working globally alongside institutions including the United Nations, Atlantic Council, and WHO. He served the agency as its CEO & Creative Director from 2015-2022, remaining a Non-Executive Director until 2024.
After supporting Virgin StartUp, Unrest and other accelerators as an 'Entrepreneur in Residence', Mike founded Kinsfolk in 2026, providing plug-in strategic and operational support for agencies, studios and creative teams.
Previously, he served as a Creative Director for the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and built the creative studio within Weber Shandwick’s (IPG, Omnicom) EMEA offering.
Kinsfolk, London
Mike is the CEO of Kinsfolk, a consultancy which helps creative agencies and studios develop the teams, leadership and systems that power award-winning work.
Built and run by senior industry pros, Kinsfolk partners across Advertising, PR, Marketing, Design, Film, Video & Games, to fill the gaps and bolster strategic growth, people development and creative workflows.
TEDx: No wonder people are quitting. Business must do better.
Quitting is at a 20-year high. After years of crisis, young people face unprecedented barriers to financial, physical, and emotional security. In response, a generation is voting with its feet - leaving companies that worsen these challenges and joining those that address them. Mike’s TEDx Talk reframes quitting, offering businesses a more human approach and urging founders to take responsibility for solving the defining issues of our time.
Mike is one of the few people I know who really understands what it takes to be a progressive business leader in the world today. Not only has he setup and grown his own successful social impact agency, but he’s taken the time to truly get to grips with the most salient issues impacting people today, such as mental heath in the workplace. If you want to help get your business in better shape for the next decade, listen to what Mike has to say.
Tom Tapper, CEO
Nice and Serious
This support has really helped unlock the next phase for the company. The guidance has been incredibly valuable in running the studio effectively and planning for future growth - from reworking how it's run on the operations side to guiding me through sustainable P&L projections. It's helped me break the cycle and given a clear direction on where I want the business to go moving forward.
Ben Taylor, CEO
Tailored Studios
Mike supported us during a critical phase of scaling our agency. With his guidance, we established in-house procedures that are both healthy for the business and supportive of the team. Mike is not only an experienced business consultant but also genuinely personable and attentive to the people behind the company. It was a true pleasure working with him, and I would highly recommend him to anyone seeking support in scaling their creative business.
Alex Aalto, CEO
AALTO Production
Read more...
Mike's first book Founder Therapy, published June 2023 reaching best-seller status.
Our ‘high-performance’ generation has a problem with burnout. Depression and anxiety are now at record levels amongst founders and leaders. In Founder Therapy, Mike Buonaiuto uncovers why and offers a radical new approach, presenting 50 lessons to start, scale and sell without wounding our wellbeing.