Why Mansio Group exists
In Portugal, thousands of healthy family businesses face the same quiet succession dilemma. Most resolve it through outright sale — losing the company's identity, watching long-time employees laid off, often seeing what took a lifetime to build get dismantled within years. The conventional alternatives — sale to a competitor, sale to a fund, closure — do not serve every founder.
Mansio Group exists to provide a third path: an operational partnership that lets the founder step back from day-to-day involvement without selling, while preserving the identity, the team, and the way the business serves its customers.
The founder
John McCoy founded Mansio Group in 2026 after 15 years operating businesses in real estate, services, and applied AI. He grew up in Ireland, moved to Hong Kong in 2015 as Sales Director for an international real estate group, and relocated to Lisbon in 2019. In Lisbon, he founded and built a 150-agent residential brokerage which he sold to Sotheby's International Realty in 2022.
Following that exit, John founded Jacaranda Labs — an applied AI consultancy working with Fortune 500 clients on operational digitisation and AI strategy. Through Jacaranda, he developed the SCOPE Framework, a proprietary methodology for introducing applied AI into established business operations.
Mansio Group is the result of bringing those two threads together: the operational experience of running and exiting established businesses, and the technical capacity to modernise others.
How we work
We commit to a small number of partnerships each year — typically two to four. The constraint is deliberate. Each business we partner with receives deep operational and technological investment for 24-36 months, not light-touch consulting.
The technology we build is specifically engineered for each partner business and the sector it operates in. We do not bring a generic SaaS product or a one-size-fits-all consulting framework. We bring engineering capacity and domain understanding applied to the specific operational realities of your business.
The methodology is the SCOPE Framework developed at Jacaranda Labs, adapted for the operational pace of an established SME rather than a Fortune 500 enterprise.
Why Portugal
The Portuguese SME market is uniquely well-suited to the partnership model. The combination of an aging founder demographic, a culturally close-knit business community where reputation and continuity matter, and a regulatory environment that rewards careful operational compliance creates conditions where what we offer is genuinely useful and underprovided.
From the team behind Jacaranda Labs
Mansio Group and Jacaranda Labs are separate legal entities. Jacaranda Labs is the team and methodology behind Mansio Group, but the two are not corporate parent and subsidiary. The Jacaranda Labs site is at jacarandalabs.io for verification.