Stewardship

How Capital Thirteen governs, supports and protects long-term value as a permanent owner.

Capital Thirteen is a privately held UK holding company. We act as a long-term owner with responsibility for the businesses and assets we support.

Stewardship is central to how we operate. Our role is not to trade outcomes but to protect durability, decision quality and trust over time.

Our approach to stewardship

We view stewardship as active responsibility rather than control.

We support management teams with clear governance, aligned incentives and disciplined capital structures. We intervene where structure or accountability requires reinforcement and remain hands-off where autonomy improves outcomes.

Our default is independence supported by clear expectations.

Governance

We prioritise governance that works in practice, not only on paper.

Decision rights are clearly defined. Accountability is explicit. Oversight is designed to support long-term thinking rather than short-term optimisation.

We prefer simple structures that remain enforceable under stress.

Alignment and incentives

We seek alignment early and maintain it over time.

Incentives should reward durable value creation rather than activity or scale. Capital allocation, reinvestment and risk decisions should benefit from shared time horizons and shared responsibility.

Misalignment is treated as a structural risk.

Capital discipline

Capital allocation is treated as a discipline and a permanent record.

We review decisions against original assumptions. We accept that inactivity is often preferable to forced action. Preservation of capital and trust takes precedence over momentum.

We are willing to do nothing when conditions are not right.

Support without dependency

We aim to be a stable and reliable owner.

We provide perspective, governance support and capital where appropriate. We avoid creating dependency. Businesses should be resilient without continuous intervention.

Our objective is strength of structure, not reliance on us.

Long-term responsibility

We take responsibility for outcomes across cycles.

Stewardship extends beyond performance in favourable conditions. We care most about behaviour under stress and decisions made when trade-offs are difficult.

Trust is earned over time and tested in hard moments.

Our role

Our role is stewardship.

We work to strengthen durability, decision-making and trust across the businesses and assets we own.

Build. Hold. Back.