A practice, not an agency
Lopes Advisory is a strategy practice founded by Tony Lopes. One principal, a deep toolkit, and a clear point of view about how the work should be done.
The short version
Twenty years across digital marketing, data, and growth — in online gaming, insurance, education, and now the energy transition. A strong opinion that most businesses don't have a marketing problem; they have a systems problem that shows up as a marketing problem. And a stronger opinion that the next decade of strategic work belongs to the people who can combine human judgement with the new generation of intelligent tools, in roughly equal measure.
Lopes Advisory is built around that combination.
Why this practice exists
After two decades inside other people's businesses — building marketing functions, leading teams, sitting in the strategy meetings where good plans went sideways for predictable reasons — a pattern became hard to ignore.
The companies that struggle aren't the ones with bad tactics. They're the ones whose marketing, sales, operations, and data live in separate worlds and never quite connect. The strategy says one thing, the CRM says another, the website is built around a third assumption, and the team running it all is too close to the work to see the gaps.
What those companies need isn't another agency. They need someone who can stand slightly outside the business, see the whole system at once, and help leadership make sharper decisions about where to focus, what to stop, and what to build next. That role doesn't have a clean name in most org charts. Strategist is too narrow. Consultant is too distant. Fractional CMO is closer but still misses the systems-thinking core of the work.
Lopes Advisory exists to do that work properly, for a small number of companies at a time, with the depth that only a focused practice can offer.
Why solar
Two reasons.
The first is that the energy transition is the most important commercial frontier of our generation, and the companies actually building it — installers, EPCs, integrators — are often run by people who came up through the engineering side of the business and never had the time or budget to build a serious strategy function. They're growing fast, hiring fast, and making decisions on instinct in a category that's getting more competitive every quarter. That's exactly the moment a strategic partner adds the most value.
The second is that the work matters. Helping a solar installer in Rotterdam or Manchester land more of the right projects, run a tighter operation, and grow into a more defensible business has a downstream consequence that compounds. More installations. Faster transition. Less carbon. The economics of the work and the meaning of the work point in the same direction, and that's a rare alignment worth building a practice around.
How the work gets done
One principal, working directly with one to four clients at a time. No account managers between you and the thinking. No junior consultants doing the actual work while a senior name attends the kickoff. The person you meet in the first conversation is the person who shows up every month for the duration of the engagement.
The toolkit is deep and getting deeper. Two decades of marketing and growth experience is the foundation. On top of that, a continuously expanding library of internal tools — built with the new generation of AI and code-generation systems — that turn what used to be weeks of analysis into days. The combination is the point: judgement and tools, neither one without the other.
Where we are
Lopes Advisory is headquartered in Johannesburg, South Africa, and works remotely with clients in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Time zones overlap comfortably with the European working day. Travel for in-person work is built into engagements where it's useful, and avoided where it isn't.
A note on what this isn't
Lopes Advisory isn't a content marketing agency, a paid media shop, a web development studio, or a fractional CMO marketplace. It's a strategic practice that does one thing — helping leadership teams make sharper decisions about how to grow — and refuses to do the other things, even when asked.
That refusal is part of the offer.
The next step
If something here resonates and you'd like to talk about whether the practice can help your business, the first step is a thirty-minute conversation. No prep required.