See what is actually constraining growth, margin and exit value.
Decision-grade commercial diagnostics for PE firms, portfolio leaders and boards.
The thread is always commercial: what are we promising, what are we delivering, and where is value leaking.
Three things PE normally hires separately.
A DD firm, an operating partner, and an exec search. This is all three, fused into one engagement.
Commercial x-ray
I assess 30 commercial failure patterns from public data. Filings, accounts, director networks, hiring signals, Glassdoor — cross-referencing what the company says with what the data shows. Delivered in days.
Value-creation plan
I build a sequenced operating plan: what's broken, what to fix first, who owns the move, what the board needs to see. KYC, KYD, win ratio, EBITDA through standardisation.
We carry out the plan
I stay to lead the execution — with specialist partners where the engagement needs it. In the room with customers. Owning the outcome. Not handing you a to-do list and leaving.
This is a real output. Not a PowerPoint.
Project Alpha — a £185M target assessed against 30 commercial failure patterns. 165 findings. One verdict. Live and interactive.
Not a refresh. Not a new sales team.
Every other consultancy sells transformation — code for "rip everything out and start again."
- New sales team
- New process for the sake of process
- New propositions from scratch
- 18-month "transformation" programme
- 200 slides, then they leave
- £250K–£500K. Pay for time. No outcome accountability.
- Walk in and work out what's real — revenue, pipeline, people, propositions — before anyone tells me "the story"
→ We need help winning a specific deal or defending a specific position
→ Our commercial engine isn't delivering and we need someone to work out why
- Amend the propositions to ones that make commercial sense — tested against what customers actually buy
- Make the hard calls on people — with evidence, not politics
- Build the plan that turns it into defendable revenue — know your customers, know your deal, win ratio discipline, and EBITDA a buyer will believe
- A fraction of the cost. Days, not months. Priced on value delivered.
- I stay to carry it out — with specialist delivery partners where the scope demands it.
Where the numbers come from.
I come at this as a commercial leader, not a programme manager. The work starts with the revenue engine — then designs whatever operating changes make it robust.
Enterprise portfolio built from closure
Business unit marked for closure. Repositioned over 4 years — same team, re-optimised. 7–11 specialist sellers. Transactional to multi-year annuity. Margin doubled. 51.3% CAGR.
Services P&L rebuilt
Services growing but margin not keeping pace. Rebuilt the proposition, pricing architecture and delivery model. Full P&L ownership. Contribution £3.9M→£15M. EBITDA up. Headcount flat.
Founder dependency removed
Business unsellable — every major customer relationship ran through one person. 3-week diagnostic. Embedded the commercial system around the team. Three years to exit. 100% self-sustaining.
A lot of this comes down to people. A pre-sales specialist who didn't see himself as "sales" — within a few years closing a £35M TCV deal. A junior from the back office, by year three delivering over £100M of revenue. People I've backed who now sit as MDs and UK Sales Directors. Fix the system, put the right people in the right roles, back them until they own the number.
The operator behind the methodology.
I founded GAIN Protocol because nothing on the market did what I needed as a commercial owner. I wanted to see a business the way a buyer or sceptical board would see it — from the outside in, before anyone told me "the story".
20 years of senior commercial leadership. The methodology is now accelerated with AI, but it starts where it always started: the statutory record, not the internal narrative.
Two propositions I designed remain in market — one serving 4.2M users across 70 countries, another white-labelled by a FTSE 250.
I lead the diagnostic and build the plan. Where the execution needs specialist delivery — restructuring, technical implementation, financial modelling — I bring in named partners. You get one point of accountability with the depth to deliver.
See the output. Judge it yourself.
A live diagnostic against a real target. Every finding explorable. The briefing room holds up against any question — that's the point.