About Me

For 14 years I have been working with companies who have been stuck on a plateau. In some cases they have been in crisis, in others they were doing “sort of OK” but wanted to do more.

After a degree in mathematics at the University of Cambridge I trained as a finance person. I have been finance director of several companies. I soon realised that finance did not have all the answers to the problem of restarting growth, but neither did any other discipline. In fact, the problem was functional specialism.

Look at how subjects are arranged in a business school with each function – finance, strategy, marketing, operations management, HR- in its own silo. It’s the same in most consultancies.

This is a good way to organise a business school, but it isn’t helpful when you need to start a business growing again. That needs a contribution from each of the specialisms. I therefore set about acquiring enough of the relevant parts of each discipline; that is just those parts which are needed to restart growth after a period of stasis. So for example I am not a marketing expert, but know enough about marketing to see when a product needs to be repositioned and what the outline of its new value proposition needs to be.

I write and publish extensively. I have two books, Business Remastered and Everything You Know About Business is Wrong. I write a monthly column for Management Today and a weekly one for forbes.com where I have been described as “the leading authority on resolving stuckness and reigniting growth”.

I speak regularly at conferences and seminars across the UK and further afield including Paris, New York, Singapore and Dubai.

I have worked as a business mentor for the Institute of Chartered Accountants and the Institute of Directors and for start-up accelerators.

Find out more about the process, or arrange a discovery session.