About
Business Transformation & Strategic Leadership describes what fourteen years have required of me, not a positioning line.
Twelve years as MD gave me the operational foundation. I took on an underinvested family business and rebuilt it: restructuring, lean manufacturing, a relocation, a repositioned market, apprenticeship programmes, two ventures founded, an exit by trade sale. The rebuild held through real shocks, a foundational client loss, Brexit, COVID, the supply chain after Russia-Ukraine, including an 85% revenue loss it came through.
I know what it is to carry the full weight of a business, not as a phase to survive but as the thing you are accountable for every day for a decade.
Eight years before that in corporate finance and investment consulting for a Swiss bank , CFA training, and then two years of work on AI disruption and investment thesis development completed the picture.
The rebuild is the evidence, the crises along the way part of it. The offer is the full framework: discipline, strategic focus, financial literacy and the presence that comes from having done the job rather than observed it.
Why This Matters Now
The businesses I work with are navigating two things simultaneously: the immediate demands of running a complex organisation, and the longer question of what their model looks like when AI has restructured the competitive landscape around them.
Very few leaders have the bandwidth to lead both well at the same time. That is where I tend to be most useful.
The Stress Test, my free economic scenario diagnostic, gives you an honest picture of how your specific business is positioned for what's coming.
For leadership teams who want to go further, the AI Era Strategy Workshop takes that picture and builds a roadmap from it - a full day that produces a situational audit, a defensibility assessment, and a 90-day action plan.
Most businesses facing major transitions get two options: strategy that arrives as a plan and stalls at execution, or waiting until pressure forces a more drastic intervention. What is missing is someone who works at board level, holds full accountability, and brings the complete range of what transformation actually requires.
Financial rigour from a CFA background and eight years in Swiss private banking. Operational depth from twelve years as MD through transformation and exit. Strategic foresight from work on AI disruption and macro economic positioning. Coaching and people capability from working with leaders under real pressure.
That combination allows me to work as fractional chairman with multiple businesses, step in as interim CEO when full-time attention is required, or take selective equity positions where long-term partnership makes sense.
How I Do This Work Differently
The Shift I'm Actually Helping Businesses Through
Most of the AI conversation aimed at business leaders is about adoption: which tools, which workflows, where the efficiencies are. That is bottom-up, and it is not what decides whether a business is still standing in five years. The harder question is top-down: when the cognitive work your business sells or relies on can be automated, what happens to your model, your margins, your team, and the competitor who starts from a blank slate with none of your legacy cost?
That is the work I do. Not installing AI into the business as it stands, but reading the cognitive-automation era the way I learned to read a market under pressure as an MD: from the position, the financials and the competitive landscape first, letting the technology decisions fall out of that rather than drive it. The same honest look at where you genuinely stand that takes a business through a turnaround, applied earlier and against a longer horizon.
I chair the AIB AI Working Group and led its published work on investing through disruption. The three-scenario framework that came out of it, the Co-Pilot Economy, the Long Rotation and the Permanent Split, is the same model behind the Stress Test on this site, and the lens I use to work out which businesses are built for what is coming and which are quietly running out of road.
How I Work With Businesses
Four ways, depending on what the situation requires:
Part-Time MD / Interim CEO: up to three days per week, board-level accountability, operational grip in the room when it counts.
Fractional Chairman / Board Adviser: one to three days per month, strategic guidance, governance, stakeholder relationships. This is how I work with most businesses.
Strategic and operational restructuring: repositioning an underperforming or exposed business while there is still time to act, working in service alongside specialist restructuring partners where a business has reached formal distress.
Equity Partnership: selective positions where long-term alignment makes sense, structured through sweat equity, reduced fees or creative deal arrangements.
The constraint is never size. It is leadership capability under pressure.
Clarity → Stability → Transformation → Innovation
How The Work Sequences
Most leaders are not undone by bad strategy. They are undone by not being honest about which phase they are actually in.
Clarity: what the numbers, culture and market are genuinely saying. Not the story you have been telling the board.
Stability: locking in cash flow, critical relationships and operating discipline. Not strategy yet. The conditions in which strategy becomes possible.
Transformation: rebuilding the operating model. Teams, workflows, culture. Half-measures do not hold.
Innovation: competitive repositioning for what is coming. New models, technology integration, the moves that put you ahead rather than just keeping pace.
Most advisers stop at Stability. The real value is not surviving the difficult period. It is emerging from it in a stronger position than the one you started from.
Whether you're positioning for strategic transformation or working through a period of real pressure, I work flexibly: fractional advisory, board-level leadership, or equity partnership depending on what makes sense.
Want to understand how this applies to your situation? Book a direct conversation
