About
Mariana Fonseca left a senior role at a Lisbon consultancy in the spring of 2019 with one clear conviction: most strategy work was being done at too great a distance from the people who had to carry it out. The firms she had worked alongside were producing thorough, well-formatted reports that sat in shared drives and changed very little. She wanted to work differently, which meant working smaller, staying longer, and being honest when the answer was not what the client hoped to hear.
The name came from a walk along the Tagus estuary near Alcochete, where egrets stand completely still in moving water and then move with sudden precision. It felt like the right image for the kind of thinking she wanted to do: patient, specific, and not easily startled. The first client was a family-owned ceramics exporter in Caldas da Rainha that needed to decide whether to open a second production site. The answer, after six weeks of work, was no. The client thanked her for saving them from a decision they had already half-committed to.
Mariana Fonseca spent eight years at a Lisbon-based management consultancy before leaving in 2019 to start Egret Endeavor from a rented desk in Cascais. Before that, she led a two-year restructuring project for a mid-sized logistics firm in Porto, an experience she credits with teaching her more about organisational inertia than any MBA module. She trained in systems thinking at the Schumacher College in Devon and holds a postgraduate certificate in change management from Nova SBE. Outside work, she keeps a small vegetable plot in Sintra and reads more maritime history than is probably useful. She is fluent in Portuguese, English, and Spanish.