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Hard decisions don’t get easier with time. They get heavier. Every leader knows the moment a difficult call presents itself. A hire who isn’t landing. A vendor who keeps missing. A product that isn’t resonating. A structure that clearly isn’t working. And yet the instinct is
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It’s theirs. You’re just renting demand at a premium. Aggregators and PPL platforms exist for one reason, to own customer intent. They dominate search, intercept leads at the point of need, and sell that intent back to you. You’re buying access to your own market. It’s
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The “Value Creation Plan” (VCP) has become a kind of corporate theatre.....a glossy internal pitch deck designed to impress LPs, not to actually change how portfolio companies run. It’s full of big promises: digital transformation, pricing excellence, sales enablement. Then it disappears into the ether the moment the
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The old model of fundraising was built on mystique. You built a brand, hired a placement agent, assembled a glossy deck full of logos, exits, and hockey-stick IRRs, and flew around the world collecting commitments based on trust or legacy. LPs weren’t really buying performance. They were buying reputation.
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They ask 'How do we go digital?' They should ask 'What business are we actually in now? Most companies think digital means “we’ve got a website” or “we’re running ads.” It’s far bigger than that. Digital has fundamentally changed what business you’re in.
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Once upon a time, conferences were where ideas were born. Now they’re where insight goes to die.....slowly, under stage lights and sponsored coffee. Panels of people who don’t operate discuss “execution.” Executives talk about “transformation” but can’t articulate a single operational lever they’ve pulled. And
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Everyone talks about AI, data, and digital transformation. But most B2B firms are still running marketing like it's 2010. The playbook that works in D2C or B2C collapses the moment your sales cycle stretches beyond a quarter. Attribution breaks. CRMs get messy. And every marketing meeting ends with:
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Didn't have a title. Didn't have a playbook. Didn't even call himself an Operator. He just showed up at a struggling portfolio company, quietly watched for a few weeks, and then made the call nobody else would: the CEO had to go. No politics.
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Everyone in the early 2000s could see the smartphone wave coming. The idea that our lives would move to a small screen in our pocket was inevitable. Analysts wrote about it. Telcos built for it. Investors piled in. And if you’d asked who would dominate this future, the answers
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Fractional CMO. Fractional CFO. Fractional CRO. Fractional sanity. It's the new epidemic of modern business......leadership as a subscription service. The model sounds brilliant in theory: get senior talent without the full-time cost. In practice? It's a carousel of consultants playing executive dress-up. They parachute in,
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And access, done right, is one of the highest-margin products on earth. Access is what turns a $100 bottle of wine into a $10,000 membership. It's what turns a hotel into Soho House, a gym into Equinox, and a handbag into Hermès. The product is just the
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AI isn't coming for customer service. It's already running it. Klarna's AI assistant handles 2.3 million conversations a month. That's two-thirds of their customer chats, with the work output of 700 agents. Resolution time dropped from 11 minutes to 2. Customer