Advisors, Operators, and Coaches
Trusted Ventures is a senior-led boutique advisory firm that helps companies navigate growth strategy, leadership development, transformation, and transition. We've advised private equity funds, owner-operated businesses, and Fortune 500 business units. We've also built, run, and sold businesses ourselves. Our diversity of perspective informs our work.
We help CEOs, founders, and leaders make better decisions, move faster, and build businesses that are stronger, more valuable, and ready for what is next.
What we believe
Senior-led, always.
A senior leader drives every engagement, bringing in experienced colleagues as the work requires.
Strategy and execution, together.
Every recommendation is built to be executed: who owns it, what it takes, where to start. When you want more than the plan, we execute it with your team.
Honest over comfortable.
We tell you what you need to hear, including when the answer is not to invest, not to sell, or not to proceed.
Operator empathy.
We know the constraints of imperfect data, tight budgets, limited bandwidth, and a team already at capacity.
Kait Brown | Strategy and Execution
Kait leads Trusted Ventures' strategy work and much of its execution work. She has advised, operated, and sold companies.
Kait is a former Manager at Bain & Company, where she worked across growth strategy, product innovation, commercial due diligence, operations and procurement transformation.
She then founded and built Savorista, the first caffeine conscious coffee company in the US, focused on craft decaf and half caf coffee. Savorista was acquired by Explorer Brands in 2025, and Kait led the sale. As Head of Strategy at Coding Dojo, a VC-backed EdTech company, she was the right hand to the CEO and internal lead for its $70M sale to a publicly traded company.
Today she works with private equity funds, owner-operated businesses, and Fortune 500 business units on growth strategy, commercial due diligence, M&A and transformation, from setting the strategy to stepping into interim leadership roles to see it through.
Kait holds an MBA from the University of Michigan Ross School of Business and a BS in International Relations from Seton Hall University.
Outside of client work, Kait enjoys mentoring entrepreneurs and serves as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence with Oneday. She loves traveling and exploring adventures big and small with her family.
Kait on LinkedIn
Daniel Fernandes | Leadership and Execution
Daniel leads Trusted Ventures' executive coaching and leadership development, along with much of the execution work. He helps founders, executives, and leadership teams solve the human challenges that block growth: clarity, trust, and the leadership capacity the next stage requires.
Daniel spent 15 years in international leadership roles at General Motors, leading large-scale change, technology integration, manufacturing launches, and cross-functional teams across a complex global organization. He has spent more than a decade coaching founders, executives, and leadership teams on performance, decision-making, trust, relationship building, and organizational change. He also trains other coaches to build their own practices.
His coaching works across five layers: emotional, relational, strategic, operational, and identity. He is direct about what he sees, and skilled at helping leaders get there themselves. He also helps leaders put AI to work in ways that make their people better at what they do.
Daniel is a Certified High Performance Coach and pursued graduate studies at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, with emphasis in management, organizational psychology, and high-performance teams. He has a BASc in Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo. He is co-founder of Trusted Ventures, Savorista, and Coaching Mastery Community. He also speaks and facilitates for leadership audiences.
Outside of work, Daniel is a multi-instrumentalist and songwriter, equally at home playing jazz piano or composing children's songs on the guitar. He also loves traveling and competing in Spartan races.
Daniel on LinkedInOur network
We craft the right team for the work
Every engagement is led by Kait or Daniel, with trusted experts brought in as needed. Our network colleagues span strategy, M&A, operations, supply chain, marketing, AI, transformation, and leadership development in a wide variety of industries. Our teams have the right expertise without the overhead of a traditional consulting pyramid.