The decision will not wait. Neither do we.
We are already here. We know the ground and we can start the day you call.
Nobody has to fly in first and learn the place while your decision waits.
Some problems never get solved because nobody will say plainly what they are. Everyone knows. People talk about them privately. But the problem sits between two departments, between a government and a company or between what people say in the room and what they will put in writing. Nobody wants to be the one to name it, so the organisation works around it instead. Each year that costs a little more.
Problems of that kind are not visible from a distance. They do not appear in a brief. The documents that reach an outside adviser describe the version everyone has agreed to write down. What is actually in the way is usually said after the meeting ends, to someone who is still in the room.
That is usually the point at which we are called.
Harpi is an advisory firm rather than a consultancy. The difference shows in where the work starts. A consultancy is bought for a service and delivers a document. We are brought in because a decision has to be made and something is stopping it.
First, the problem. What is actually happening, what is constraining it, who has to agree and what has already been tried. Most of the situations we are called into have been described several times already. The description is usually part of what is wrong. That is not work that can be done from somewhere else.
Then the decisions. Not advice in general, but the specific choices that have to be made, by whom and by when. A decision with no owner and no date is a preference.
Then the oversight. We stay while those decisions are carried out, because the distance between deciding and doing is where most of them are lost. Staying is only possible if you were already here.
The matters that reach us are important and complicated, politically or commercially sensitive or simply not being solved. Often all three.
What makes the advice worth having.
Already on the ground.
We are based in Georgetown, work from Willemstad and visit Suriname rather than keep an office there. Beyond those three we have no offices and would rather say so than claim otherwise. What we do have is the region: the same institutions, the same commercial habits, the same way decisions get made. Where a market is new to us we go in alongside people who have worked there.
Independent.
We have nothing to sell you except the advice. No software, no systems to install, no people to place. The fee for advising you is paid by you and by nobody else, so the only thing we have to protect is whether the advice was right.
Fluent on both sides.
International standards and local knowledge, held by the same people. Advising across borders is not about applying a framework in a new place. It is knowing how each side thinks and knowing that advice still has to be carried to people who were not there to hear it.
Joseph De Jonge founded Harpi because the most useful advice in emerging markets cannot be delivered from a distance. By the time an adviser has arrived, learned the market and returned with a report, the decision may already have been made.
Understanding the context is not enough. You have to be close enough to see what is changing, what is getting in the way and what can actually be done.
His career has taken him across three continents and very different environments, from structured finance in New York with UBS and BlackRock to academia in London, where he lectured at London South Bank University. Those experiences shaped how he looks at institutions, incentives, people and decisions.
The firm began in London in 2015 and was selected that year for LSBU’s Graduate Entrepreneur Scheme. It moved to Georgetown as the region’s largest decisions came into view.
London South Bank University, Graduate Entrepreneur Scheme, December 2015
The decisions that determine whether a high-growth economy captures its moment, or misses it, are rarely made with enough clarity, speed or confidence. That is where I work.
Our clients are leadership teams and boards, ministries and agencies, founders and family enterprises, development organisations and financial institutions. The moment they call is almost always the same one. A decision has to be taken and the picture is still forming.
We already understand the environment you work in, so none of your time goes on teaching us. By the time you finish briefing us we know which constraints are real and how fast the window is closing. That is not a method. It is a consequence of being here.
It is why we can be quick without being careless and rigorous without being remote.
Advice can be flown in. Judgement about a place cannot. We are here because that is the only way to be useful at the moment a decision is taken.