Why does Corefield exist?
Almost everyone who advises owners on succession comes from finance: accountants, valuators, wealth advisors, brokers. They are the right people for the paper side, and owners need them.
Almost nobody comes from operations and reliability engineering, the discipline of keeping complex systems running whoever happens to be on shift. That is the side of succession most owners never get help with: whether the business still works when the person running it stops. Corefield exists to do that work, and to prove it.
Who founded Corefield?
Corefield was founded by Jay Karnni, a marine engineer and maintenance-systems specialist. His career has been one long version of the same job: take over an operation, find out what its previous keepers knew, and rebuild it so it runs without them.
- 2005–15Marine engineer at sea, rising to third engineer on crude and product tankers. Engines, generators, pumps and purifiers, across more than 33 countries. Part of an engine-room crew that passed a SIRE tanker inspection with zero findings.
- 2016Set up planned maintenance at a large food-processing plant that had never had an asset register.
- 2016–17Led about thirty engineers and data staff building ships’ maintenance and spares databases, sending small teams aboard for weeks at a time to record how each vessel really worked.
- 2017–18After Maersk Line acquired nineteen vessels, reconstructed how each ship had actually been maintained and moved it into Maersk’s systems in nine months, so nothing was lost at handover.
- 2018–19Cleaned up a maintenance system full of duplicate jobs across 93 vessels, then led the merger of three companies’ maintenance, inventory, procurement and safety systems onto one platform.
- 2020Master of Engineering Leadership, University of British Columbia.
- 2021–Work on the systems that keep a fleet of more than 160 vessels maintained, compliant and supplied, including bringing each newly acquired ship into them so it works from day one.
He also holds a Bachelor of Engineering (Mechanical) and a postgraduate diploma in marine engineering.
Why does a ship matter to a business owner?
A ship is the clearest example of a business that runs without any one person. The crew changes every few months, and the ship keeps sailing, because the maintenance system, the procedures and the handovers hold the knowledge.
In 2017, nineteen ships changed owners without losing a single maintenance record. Most businesses can’t survive their owner taking a fortnight off. The difference isn’t the quality of the people. It is where the knowledge lives, and whether anyone has ever checked.
“I want to know where something genuinely stands, not where everyone assumes it does. I want to know where it needs to get to, and by when. Then it is a matter of finding the most effective way to close that distance, and following through.”
Why two names?
Jay Karnni is the name he publishes and works under. His legal name is Abhijit Kulkarni, and that is the name on every contract, engagement letter and filing. As he puts it: “Karnni is from Kulkarni. Jay is what people call me.”
Has he written anything?
Jay Karnni is the author of The Quiet Gap (2026), a book about the distance between the life a person is living and the one they are capable of. The four questions Corefield works through began there. Nobody working with Corefield is expected to have read it. More at karnni.com.
How is Corefield set up?
Corefield Succession Advisory is a business name of Alphraa Ventures Corporation. Alphraa also owns a company that acquires businesses. No business that has been a paid Corefield client is ever acquired by it, and nothing learned in a Corefield engagement is ever shared with it. That is written into every engagement letter. See Our commitments.
Does Corefield pass its own test?
It is being built to. A succession firm that couldn’t survive its founder’s absence would have the very problem it diagnoses in others. So the method is written down, the definitions are published, the work is documented well enough to teach, and the firm is being set up so that others can deliver it to the same standard.