In a previous piece, I wrote about how a startup’s operating system has to change as the business scales — the shift from founder-led improvisation to distributed accountability, from 1.0 to 2.0. But there’s a question that sits underneath all of that, one that rarely gets asked directly: what is the company now for? Most…
There’s a moment in most scale-up (ie post-startup) businesses when someone — usually not the founder — looks around and realizes the company is juggling two operating systems at once. The old one, built for speed and founder judgment and improvisation. And the new one, which doesn’t exist yet but which the business desperately needs….
A global technology business had grown significantly through acquisition — more than twenty M&A events over a sustained period — leaving a portfolio of fragmented brands, products, and go-to-market approaches with no unifying commercial logic. Each acquisition had made sense individually. Collectively, they presented customers, partners, and internal teams with a confusing and inconsistent picture…
A growth-stage SaaS business in a specialist market had strong product capability and an established client base. Its commercial operation — sales process, pipeline management, marketing alignment, and client retention — had not evolved to match either its ambitions or the competitive environment it was moving into. As Chief Revenue Officer I transformed the commercial…
A software and consulting organization founded on genuine intellectual distinction had never fully resolved the tension between its founder’s ambitions and the commercial disciplines needed to sustain a healthy business. The result was an organization that carried its losses with a degree of inevitability — talented, respected in its field, but structurally unable to convert…
An established global hardware and manufacturing business understood, strategically, that it needed to move toward cloud- and IoT-based recurring revenue models. The challenge was not articulating why — the strategic case was clear. The challenge was that the organization’s instincts, culture, and commercial reflexes had been built over decades around physical products and the economics…
A global organization with deep expertise and a proven product portfolio in banking automation identified retail automation as its next major market opportunity. The product foundation was strong — engineered to a high standard, with a track record of performance in demanding financial services environments. The challenge was that the portfolio had been built and…
A global organization had developed and launched a modern product portfolio designed to replace an aging category across all markets. In the Americas, the transition hadn’t happened. The regional business remained anchored to a legacy variant with declining demand, unconvinced that the modern portfolio would work for their market — while competitors were reading the…
