Jim Tunstall, Founding Principal
I founded Dignus Muneris because I believed that the structured advisory support that has been available to larger businesses should be available, on the right terms, to ambitious SMEs.
Dignus Muneris is led by Jim Tunstall, who founded the practice in 2025 after a career that has spanned strategic development, leadership coaching, and scaling work with SMEs and growth-stage businesses. The practice is the considered outcome of recognising that the work of supporting ambitious businesses through scaling decisions, investment events, and capital access is best done by senior people who understand how those moments actually unfold, and who have the discipline to build capability rather than to create dependency.
The intellectual foundation of Dignus Muneris is in the work of scaling the Innovate UK Scaleup Programme nationally from 2017 onward. The pilot proved that structured, capability-building support delivered by senior practitioners could produce durable outcomes for high-potential SMEs. The work that followed — building the programme to fifty-two people nationally, forty-three scaleup directors with the supporting infrastructure to deliver consistently at that scale — was where the methodology was refined into something that could be applied repeatedly, in different sectors, by different senior people, with reliable results. Dignus Muneris carries that refined methodology forward.
My own background combines work as a social economist, change and development consultant, and leadership coach. I have worked across innovation infrastructure, scaling businesses, and the institutional ecosystem that surrounds them. That background informs how I approach engagement — the substantive work of helping a business scale is the work of helping the founder team build the strategic, financial, and operational capability to do so, in a way that persists after the engagement ends.
Five pillars on a single analytical foundation.
What underpins every engagement.
The five pillars are what the practice delivers. The analytical foundation is what makes them coherent — the substantive working basis that every engagement is built on, regardless of which pillar the client engages with.
Three things constitute the foundation.
Methodology lineage. The practice's working approach is grounded in the methodology refined inside the 2017 Innovate UK Scaleup Programme, and developed across the years since across hundreds of engagements with innovation-driven businesses. The methodology is not a framework offered as a product; it is the substrate the work is done from. Audiences with substantive experience of the Scaleup Programme period will recognise the lineage in the way the practice operates.
Standards of evidence. Every engagement is built on the same standards — partner-led, evidence-based, structured rather than improvised, and rigorous about the difference between assertion and demonstration. The standards are the same whether the engagement is a major commercial due diligence for an institutional investor or a focused investment-readiness piece for a founder-led business.
Integrated perspective. The five pillars are not independent service lines. IP positioning shapes investor narrative; commercial due diligence questions inform investment readiness; scaling advisory anticipates the capital event that follows. Much of the practice's value sits in seeing these connections and bringing them into a single engagement.
This is the working foundation. It is the reason the five pillars hold together as a coherent practice rather than as a service catalogue, and it is the substantive basis for the standing position that the practice operates as a trusted peer rather than as a vendor.
Working with Jim
Dr Brian More is a Partner in the practice, leading on intellectual property strategy and bringing specialist expertise to engagements where IP is a material business asset. Brian was also part of the original Innovate UK Scaleup team for many years, and that shared lineage shapes the way the practice approaches IP as an integral part of scaling and investment, not as a separate technical workstream.
His work spans licensing strategy, deal structuring, and the valuation of intangible assets — the disciplines that determine whether IP translates into durable commercial advantage and credible enterprise value at the point of an investment or transaction. He brings an international dimension to this work, with experience structuring licensing and commercialisation arrangements across North American, European and Asia-Pacific jurisdictions, and advising innovation-driven businesses on how their IP position is read by overseas partners, licensees and investors.
Caroline Collings-Wood is a Partner in the practice, bringing the experience of a seasoned business coach and mentor with a strong track record of helping companies grow, scale and navigate change. A CIMA-qualified accountant by background, she has held Interim FD and MD roles, served as COO of an expanding plc group across eighteen life-sciences businesses, and founded and exited her own award-winning group after twenty-one years.
She works closely with scale-up businesses developing disruptive technologies — supporting them through funding, complex transactions (including OFT and MMC enquiries, MBOs and deals up to £107m), and international expansion into North America through her established US network. Her sector experience spans life sciences and healthcare, marine, manufacturing, food production, retail, professional services and SaaS.
Jim Doherty serves as Non-Executive Director and is a highly experienced investment specialist. A former colleague from eight years on the Innovate UK Scaleup Programme, he brings senior investment judgement and a deep understanding of how innovation-driven businesses navigate capital events.
Beyond those named here, the practice draws on senior practitioners with whom I have worked in the years since — relationships built on the kind of durability that cannot be assembled, only earned.
If you are considering an engagement, the right next step is a conversation. I read the work seriously and I respect your time. We will know quickly whether the work we do is the right fit for what you are trying to do.
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