You have the vision.I build the rest.

Leisl Algeo. Builder. Founder. Operator.

Strategy is just a story. I make it real.

I work with founders and leaders building something new — organisations that need someone who can hold the vision and build the thing at the same time.

Let's talk

The story so far

Fifteen years. Six sectors. Dozens of organisations at the moment where something new needed to exist. I've founded schools, built fintech growth teams, led nonprofit turnarounds, and helped founders turn a product idea into something people actually use. I don't consult from the outside. I get in and build.

Right now I'm based in Cape Town, working as a fractional COO for a tech startup in the neurodivergent education space. I'm looking for my next substantive role — the kind where the problem is real, the founding team is honest, and the blank page is still mostly blank.

Case studies

Things I've built

Four organisations, taken from an idea to a living, working thing.

Launchpad Montessori

Founder & Director

I started Launchpad because the kind of early childhood education I believed in didn't exist in the communities I was working in. I built three multilingual Montessori preschools from the ground up — finding the spaces, hiring the teachers, writing the curriculum, managing the finances, and keeping the doors open. I found the capital to grow the business and had a successful exit. It taught me how to take an idea and turn it into a living, breathing organisation.

GoTyme Bank

Founding Growth Team

GoTyme was one of the first fully digital banks in South Africa, and I joined at the moment when the product existed but the growth engine didn't. I hired and managed a team of 50 Tyme Ambassadors deployed across the country, and was part of the team that took the bank from zero customers to over a million in under two years. At the core of it was a simple human belief — that financial access and literacy shouldn't be a privilege. Helping build something that made that real for people, inside a fast-moving commercial environment, is where I understood that purpose and profit don't have to pull in opposite directions.

African Leadership Academy

Programme Director

ALA has over 1,000 alumni across the globe — young Africans who left the continent to study and build skills, and who want to come back and make a meaningful contribution. My job was to build the system that made that possible: a network of internships and career opportunities, sourced across the continent, that gave alumni a real pathway home. Delivering that against a Mastercard Foundation grant meant holding two things at once — the rigour that a funder of that scale expects, and a programme that actually worked for the people it was designed to serve. That balance is something I've carried into every role since.

Dalza

Fractional COO

Dalza is a mobile platform connecting parents, teachers, and practitioners around children with neurodivergent needs. I've just come into the business and I'm in the work of understanding what's been built, where the gaps are, and what the organisation needs to move from early traction to sustainable growth. My mandate is to build the operational infrastructure and go-to-market foundations that give the product — and the team — the best possible chance of making a lasting difference for the families who need it.

How I work

The organisations I'm drawn to are building something — a new product, a new idea, a new way of solving a problem that hasn't been solved well enough yet. What they need is someone who can take that idea, refine it to market fit, and then build it. That's where I come in.

I work as a fractional operator and programme leader — embedded in the business, not advising from the outside. Before anything else, I talk to people. I want to understand what they do, how they do it, what's working and what's quietly draining the organisation. I want to know where you're trying to go — whether that's launching a new programme, growing your user base, building a sustainable funding model, or getting the organisation ready for its next chapter — and what the culture needs to look like to get there. From that I build a clear plan, and then I get to work.

I work with for-profit startups and nonprofits alike. The problems are different, the constraints are different, but the work is the same: take what exists, understand it honestly, and build what's needed next.

I don't hand you a roadmap and leave. I hold both — and I stay until the thing is real.

Let's talk

The first step is a conversation.

If you think there might be a fit — a real problem, an honest team, a mostly-blank page — tell me what you're building.

leisl.algeo@gmail.com

Leisl Algeo — Builder. Founder. Operator.

Cape Town, South Africaleisl.algeo@gmail.com