Engagements

Selected work, measured

Clients are not named. These accounts are shared with permission, with identifying detail removed, and every figure was confirmed by the client’s own finance function.

FilterAll fiveExecutionGovernanceLeadership transition Before → after, as measured at handover

Listed industrial group · £1.4bn revenue

A strategy the organisation had quietly declined to implement

Strategy Execution Review → Executive Counsel24 months

Situation

The board had approved a shift toward service revenue eighteen months earlier. Service revenue had moved from 11% to 12%. Nobody had refused; the sales incentive plan simply paid on equipment volume, and every rational salesperson responded accordingly.

Intervention

The review found four structures pulling against the strategy — compensation, the pipeline definition, the divisional P&L boundary, and the composition of the executive meeting itself. We rebuilt the incentive plan, moved service into its own P&L with a named owner, and changed what the executive team reviewed first each month.

Outcome

Service revenue reached 27% within two years with essentially the same sales organisation. Group gross margin rose six points as mix shifted toward recurring work.

Service revenue

~~12%~~27%

Group gross margin

~~31.4%~~37.5%

Structural blockers

“Elena is the only advisor we have engaged who told the board it was the board’s problem.”Chair

Family-owned manufacturer · Third generation

Two years of succession discussion, no succession

Board Effectiveness11 weeks

Situation

The founder’s son was the presumed successor. He was capable, and nobody — including the non-family directors — believed he was the right choice. The decision had been deferred at four consecutive board meetings in increasingly procedural language.

Intervention

Commissioned by the chair. The work was largely conversational: separating the family question from the governance question, and giving the board a defensible process so the decision could stop being a personal judgement about a colleague’s son.

Outcome

An external chief executive was appointed eleven weeks after the engagement began. The son took a board seat representing the family shareholding, which remains intact.

Board meetings deferring the decision

Weeks from engagement to decision

—11

Family shareholding

~~100%~~100%

“She gave us a process, and the process gave us permission.”Senior independent director

Healthcare services group · Private-equity owned

An executive meeting that governed nothing

Leadership Transition6 months

Situation

A newly appointed chief executive inherited a weekly executive meeting of fourteen people running three hours. It reviewed performance thoroughly and decided almost nothing; real decisions happened in bilateral conversations afterwards, invisible to the group.

Intervention

We redesigned the operating rhythm: a smaller decision forum, a separate performance review, and a written decision log with named owners and dates. The unglamorous change — the log — turned out to matter most.

Outcome

Decisions closed per month more than tripled, executive meeting hours fell by forty percent, and the sponsor’s operating partner adopted the log across two other portfolio companies.

Decision forum size

147

Executive meeting hours

~~100%~~60%

Decisions closed / month

1×3.2×

“I arrived with a hundred-day plan. She talked me out of it.”Chief executive

Mutual insurer · $3.2bn premiums

A diligent board that spent its time on the past

Board Effectiveness8 weeks

Situation

The board was well qualified, well attended and well prepared. It was also, by its own later admission, almost entirely retrospective: packs of two hundred pages, and a strategy discussion that reliably began after the coffee had gone cold.

Intervention

Observation of two full meetings and a confidential interview with every director. We timed the agenda, mapped where papers came from and what they asked the board to decide, and rebuilt the pack around decisions rather than disclosures.

Outcome

Forward-looking discussion went from under a third of board time to more than half. The pack halved. Two long-deferred decisions — a distribution partnership and an exit from a line — were taken within the next two meetings.

Board time on forward agenda

~~28%~~57%

Board pack length

~~212pp~~96pp

Deferred decisions closed

“She showed us we had spent 70% of our time on the past.”Chair

Enterprise software company · NASDAQ-listed

Six strategic priorities, and nothing stopped

Executive Counsel12 months

Situation

A growth plan added six company-wide priorities to an organisation already running at capacity. Twelve months in, all six were amber, attrition in engineering had doubled, and every priority owner could show their workstream was on track.

Intervention

Fortnightly counsel with the chief executive, beginning with a single exercise: what would the company stop to make room? The executive team retired two priorities outright, merged two more, and removed eleven recurring internal reports.

Outcome

With two priorities rather than six, both shipped within three quarters. Engineering attrition returned to its previous level, and net revenue retention rose for the first time in two years.

Company-wide priorities

Engineering attrition

~~22%~~11%

Recurring internal reports

3423

“The only person in my week with no stake in the answer.”Chief executive

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