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Translating between the deal team that wants “disciplined growth” (whatever that means this quarter) and the management team that wants to protect their P&L (and their jobs). Half the time, both sides are wrong. The deal team wants 20% growth with no investment. Management wants investment with no
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Most people still credit the pandemic with “inventing” remote work. The early software world would find that amusing. Basecamp, GitHub and Automattic were already proving the model while everyone else was debating dress codes and mandatory fun days. Automattic grew into a multibillion-dollar company without a headquarters, and somehow
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Everyone nods when it's presented. No one owns it when the quarter misses. Most "commercial excellence" programs in PE are theatre. They're built to look rigorous......frameworks, benchmarks, workshops. But they rarely move the needle. Why? Because they start with PowerPoint, not P&
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Scroll for five minutes and witness the parade: "Honoured and humbled to be named to the Top 40 Under 40 Over 30 list by a magazine that didn't exist last Tuesday." "Thrilled to announce I'll be speaking at the Northeast Regional Summit for
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Reviving dead brands for one last round of commercial exploitation. The model is simple, seductive, and deeply cynical. A licensing group buys the intellectual property of a failed brand......just the name, trademarks, and logos. Not the stores, not the people, not the product capability. Just the shell. They then
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Decks have become the modern currency of credibility. Consultants trade them. Bankers weaponise them. Operators tolerate them. Somewhere between analysis and action, we decided that design equals depth. That if it's animated, it must be insightful. The medium became the message......and the message got lost. In consulting,
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Somewhere along the way, we made “busy” a personality trait. Ask anyone how they’ve been and the default answer is the same: “Busy.” Like it’s proof of relevance. A humblebrag wrapped in exhaustion. People wear their overcommitment like armour. Too busy to think. Too busy to prioritise. Too
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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
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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.