A PE-backed professional services business was under pressure from under-performance, changing market priorities, and rising stakeholder expectations. The board needed to reset strategy and execution — fast.
The challenge
The business had been acquired 18 months earlier with a clear value creation thesis: consolidate fragmented market, cross-sell premium services, exit at 2.5x multiple within 4 years.
By Month 18, the plan was stalling:
- Revenue growth flat (organic growth offset by client churn).
- Cross-sell strategy delivering less than 20% of projected uplift.
- Operating margin declining (cost base growing faster than revenue).
- Management team unclear on root cause — was it market headwinds, execution gaps, or strategy mismatch?
The PE Operating Partner needed board-level commercial challenge to help the CEO and executive team diagnose what was broken — and reset execution before the exit window closed.
My role
I joined the board as NED with specific remit: bring commercial clarity to the diagnosis and help reset strategy and execution for the next 12-18 months.
Over 90 days, I worked with the board and management team to:
- Diagnose the real problem: not market headwinds (competitors were growing), not poor execution (the team was capable). The issue: the original value creation thesis assumed client demand for premium cross-sell services, but clients were actually buying on price and saw “premium” as over-engineered.
- Reset commercial strategy: pivoted from premium cross-sell to operational efficiency + selective M&A to consolidate market share. Repriced core services to defend volume, cut cost-to-serve by 18%, and identified 3 bolt-on acquisition targets to accelerate consolidation.
- Rebuild board-management rhythm: installed monthly commercial review cadence (replacing quarterly governance-heavy board meetings). Focused board discussions on 5 leading indicators that predicted revenue and margin trajectory.
The outcome
12 months post-reset:
- Revenue growth back to 12% (from flat).
- Operating margin improved 6 percentage points.
- 2 bolt-on acquisitions completed (adding £8m revenue).
- Exit process launched (18 months ahead of original plan).