Real situations.
Practical decisions.
Measurable impact.

An inherited portfolio of 18 customers across 23 locations presented an interesting problem. All of it counted as revenue. But not all of it contributed to the business in the same way. Looking at the portfolio through the lens of margin and recoverability separated it into four distinct groups: 5 were healthy. Protect them. 4 were low-margin, but recoverable. Their economics could improve through cost correction. 5 were low-margin and couldn’t be fixed through costs alone. They needed a different commercial equation. 4 were negative-margin. Continuing on the existing terms meant continuing to lose value. That distinction changed the decisions that followed. The recoverable accounts didn’t need repricing. They needed their costs fixed. For the five where internal corrections weren’t enough, the natural decision point was renewal. A “no-regret” price was offered — one at which retaining the business made economic sense. Three customers continued on the revised terms; two exited amicably. Negative-margin business was different. There was little logic in waiting for renewal while continuing to lose money. The contractual notice provision allowed an earlier commercial reset. Revised terms were offered; when they didn’t work for the customers, all four relationships were exited. At that point, the inherited portfolio itself was healthier. Business-unit EBITDA had improved by 3%. But that created another question. What happens to the revenue that was deliberately given up? Simply becoming more profitable by becoming smaller wasn’t the objective. In parallel, someone within the team who showed strong commercial potential was moved into sales and developed for the role. The revenue surrendered through the exits was subsequently replaced revenue-for-revenue, with new business carrying substantially stronger margins.

The result changed again. Overall business-unit EBITDA improvement reached 6%. What stayed with me from the experience was the distinction between revenue growth and revenue quality. Revenue isn’t automatically good simply because it adds to the topline. Sometimes it needs to be protected. Sometimes repaired. Sometimes repriced. And sometimes replaced. The harder decision isn’t whether to keep a customer. It is knowing what has to be true for that customer to be worth keeping.

A regulatory change once created a significant shift in demand in a business I was part of.

The obvious opportunity was growth.

The less obvious question was whether the existing commercial model still made sense in the changed environment.

At the time, one of the models available to corporate customers was usage-linked: they paid only for the capacity they actually used.

That worked when utilisation risk largely sat with the service provider.

But the regulatory change altered the equation. Corporates now had a stronger need to ensure that capacity was available when their employees required it.

That opened up a different commercial possibility.

Instead of continuing to carry utilisation risk on new business, new corporate partnerships moved towards a committed-capacity model — a defined capacity commitment irrespective of actual utilisation.

Existing arrangements were honoured. The change was prospective.

And it wasn’t necessarily the easier proposition to sell.

Customers accustomed to paying only for actual usage naturally questioned why they should commit to capacity they might not fully consume.

That required a different commercial conversation — one centred on assured availability rather than consumption alone.

As the portfolio grew, another insight started emerging.

Committed capacity and actual demand were not the same thing.

Patterns of utilisation across multiple corporate relationships provided a much clearer understanding of when and how that committed capacity was actually being consumed.

That intelligence made it possible to manage the underlying physical capacity more productively, while continuing to protect the availability promised to corporate employees.

So what began as a change in the commercial construct gradually became something broader:

more predictable corporate revenue, better visibility into demand behaviour, and more intelligent capacity management.

The approach subsequently became the standard commercial model across geographies.

What stayed with me from that experience was how easily an external change can be viewed only through the lens of “more demand.”

Sometimes the more important question is:

Has the change also created an opportunity to rethink how the business earns from that demand?

Because when the market changes, capturing more demand is one opportunity.

Changing the economics behind it can be the bigger one.

Sometimes a commercially viable opportunity looks unviable because the costing is based on the way delivery has traditionally been organised.

I encountered this while managing a customer requirement that extended across seven locations in three cities.

The business had been won with a commercial structure that worked across the overall engagement. But when it came to delivering in one of the geographies, there was a problem.

The conventional way of deploying resources there couldn’t support the requirement within the costs built into the proposal.

At first glance, that makes it a pricing problem.

Increase the price. Absorb the additional cost. Or conclude that the geography isn’t commercially viable.

But there was another question worth asking:

Was the cost itself the constraint—or was the cost a consequence of how we were accustomed to organising delivery?

The existing approach relied largely on sourcing manpower through established databases and conventional recruitment channels.

So instead of changing the customer proposition, we examined whether the required capability could be assembled differently.

One source was particularly useful: people who already understood the nature of the work.

Existing workforce networks and referrals opened access to suitable local manpower beyond the conventional sourcing pool. That meant mobilising capabilities beyond my immediate team and aligning them around the business strategy. HR became integral to translating the sourcing approach into execution—identifying, validating and deploying the required manpower locally.

The operating model changed, but ownership didn’t.

The customer relationship and operational responsibility continued to sit with our team. Delivery in the other geography was managed remotely, supported by planned on-ground reviews every quarter.

What could have been treated as a geographical limitation became a workable operating model.

And importantly, it wasn’t a short-term workaround.

The arrangement continued for 2.5 years, and the customer relationship subsequently expanded by another two locations.

The experience also changed how similar opportunities could be evaluated.

A geography that appears expensive under one delivery method isn’t necessarily an expensive geography.

Sometimes the underlying assumption used to build the cost is what needs examination.

That distinction matters because businesses can lose perfectly viable opportunities when an existing operating method quietly becomes a commercial constraint.

Before deciding that an opportunity doesn’t work at a particular cost, it may be worth asking whether the cost is wrong—or whether the operating assumption behind it is.

There was someone in my team whose role had largely settled into coordination and delivery.

He knew the operations well. But communication wasn’t his strength, and anything beyond his established responsibilities wasn’t something he readily took on.

Formal operational communication, commercial proposals, renewal conversations and negotiations had therefore largely remained a level above him.

It would have been easy to continue that way.

After all, when something important needs to get done, the quickest route is often to give it to the person already capable of doing it.

But that also creates a pattern.

The more responsibility stays with the more experienced layer, the fewer opportunities the next layer gets to become capable of carrying it.

So the expectation started changing.

Operational matters worth formally communicating were no longer automatically taken upward. He began writing those emails himself.

Then came commercial proposals.

Then parts of renewal and negotiation conversations.

The difficult discussions and closing situations could still come to me, but everything didn’t need to.

None of this happened because his weaknesses disappeared first.

In fact, one small thing stayed with me.

Written communication was difficult for him. Instead of allowing that limitation to become a reason not to communicate, he found his own workaround—Google Translate—and started using it to draft what he needed to send.

That mattered more to me than the tool itself.

The responsibility had created a reason for him to solve a limitation that the earlier scope of his role had allowed him to live with.

Over time, someone who had largely coordinated and delivered began carrying communication, proposals and a degree of commercial responsibility as well.

I have seen the same pattern in different forms.

I saw something similar with someone whose existing role was largely operational and had little to do with sales. There was commercial potential, but no established sales track record. Rather than waiting for him to look completely ready for the transition, he was given a clear first-sale expectation, a tight deadline and the responsibility to find his way towards it. He did.

In another instance, someone managing an operating centre showed potential beyond the role she was performing. She subsequently moved into Sales within the organisation. Years later, her career has progressed to an AGM-level role elsewhere.

Different people. Different situations.

But they changed how I think about readiness.

There are situations where people genuinely need training before responsibility can increase.

But there are also situations where waiting for someone to become completely ready can become the very reason they don’t develop.

Responsibility creates a different kind of pressure.

It makes people confront what they don’t know, find mechanisms around what they cannot yet do, ask for help where they need it and gradually expand the boundary of what they can own.

For a leader, that can require resisting a very tempting option:

doing it yourself simply because you can do it faster or better today.

Because the objective isn’t only to get today’s work done.

It is also to build an organisation where tomorrow’s work doesn’t always have to travel upward to get done.

Sometimes readiness earns responsibility.

And sometimes responsibility is what creates the readiness.

I walked into a business where manpower deficiency was running at roughly 25% across multiple customer locations.

The immediate problem was obvious: service continuity.

Every gap had to be filled. Every uncovered requirement had the potential to affect the customer relationship, revenue and eventually the reputation of the business.

And the team was solving those gaps.

Again and again.

Resources were found at short notice. Deployments were rearranged. At times, additional cost had to be absorbed simply to keep operations running.

It kept the business moving.

But after a point, one question became difficult to ignore:

If we are getting better at solving the same problem every time it occurs, have we actually solved the problem?

The individual manpower disruptions were difficult to predict.

But across a sufficiently large operation, the fact that some disruption would occur was entirely predictable.

That changed the way the problem needed to be approached.

The answer couldn’t remain finding another replacement every time a gap appeared. The operating model itself needed enough resilience to absorb normal manpower variability without immediately turning it into a customer problem.

In an earlier post, I wrote about improving the quality of the customer portfolio. That commercial correction created room for something equally important: building resilience into operations.

Part of that room came from better-margin business. Another part came from examining the permanent cost structure and finding sustainable efficiencies.

Instead of treating those improvements purely as additional margin, some of that economic capacity could now support something the operation had historically lacked:

a dedicated manpower bench.

Building it wasn’t an overnight fix.

For roughly six months, the immediate team continued managing shortages as they occurred while the longer-term structure was being put in place.

It also required capabilities beyond my immediate team to align around the operating strategy. With the necessary cross-functional involvement and approvals, recruitment progressively built the bench to 24 resources.

That changed the equation.

A resource becoming unexpectedly unavailable no longer had to automatically trigger a fresh search, an emergency deployment or a customer-facing problem.

There was now capacity designed specifically to absorb variability.

The result was a reduction in manpower deficiency from approximately 25% to less than 3%.

But the number isn’t what stayed with me.

It was the distinction between repeatedly managing a shortage and building an operating structure that could absorb one.

Businesses need firefighting capability. There will always be problems that genuinely cannot be predicted.

But when the same category of problem keeps returning, repeatedly becoming better at firefighting can quietly become the operating model itself.

At that point, the question changes from:

“How do we solve this occurrence?”

to:

“What should we build so that the next occurrence doesn’t become the same business problem?”

That is where resilience starts replacing reaction.

Two businesses. Two very different industries.

Both eventually delivered growth well beyond where they started.

But applying the same growth formula to both would probably have failed.

In the first business, the starting point was 18 customers across 23 locations.

The instinct could have been to pursue more customers immediately.

But growth wasn’t the first problem that needed solving.

The existing portfolio had to become economically healthier. Low-margin and negative-margin business needed correction, repricing or exit. At the same time, recurring operational weaknesses needed a more structural solution.

Those changes have been separate experiences in themselves.

What became interesting was what happened after them.

As the quality of the business improved and delivery became more dependable, market credibility started changing.

Then came an important signal.

A major account that had been with an established industry player for around a decade moved its business to us.

Another long-standing account followed.

Beyond the revenue they brought, wins like these mattered because some customers carry disproportionate credibility in a market. When they reconsider a long-established relationship, the market notices.

The business eventually moved from 18 customers across 23 locations to 49 customers across 65 locations.

That experience could easily have created a personal growth playbook:

Fix the portfolio → strengthen operations → establish credibility → scale.

Except the next business needed something different.

It operated in an entirely different industry, with a different customer proposition and different economics.

There, the starting corporate portfolio was just 6 customers.

Operational credibility wasn’t the fundamental constraint.

The commercial architecture was.

Part of the business still depended on a usage-linked model where revenue followed actual consumption. A change in the external environment created an opportunity to reconsider that equation.

For new partnerships, the commercial model shifted towards committed capacity.

The proposition changed. Revenue became more predictable. And as the portfolio expanded, demand patterns also enabled the underlying capacity to be managed more intelligently.

That business grew from 6 corporate customers to 33.

Two businesses.

Different industries. Different starting points. Different constraints. Different interventions.

And that is probably the more useful lesson behind the growth numbers.

In the first, growth followed improvements in revenue quality, operating resilience and market credibility.

In the second, growth followed a change in the commercial model itself.

Trying to apply the first formula to the second would have meant solving the wrong problem.

It changed the way I think about growth.

A growth strategy shouldn’t necessarily begin with:

“How do we sell more?”

It may need to begin one step earlier:

“What is preventing this particular business from scaling?”

Sometimes the answer is the customer portfolio.

Sometimes operations.

Sometimes pricing or the commercial model.

Sometimes market credibility.

And sometimes something entirely different.

The ability to grow a business isn’t necessarily the ability to repeat a successful playbook.

It is the ability to identify what is constraining this business—and build the playbook around that.

One customer relationship taught me something interesting about contracts.

A contract can define obligations very clearly.

That doesn’t necessarily mean applying each clause independently will produce the best business outcome.

This particular agreement had demanding obligations on both sides.

The customer had committed to making payments within 7 business days.

On our side, there were defined service requirements, with financial penalties attached to deficiencies.

During the first six months, both became a problem.

There were instances where resources deployed by us were rejected, sometimes for reasons we believed did not reasonably reflect their suitability. Those instances were documented formally.

But documentation didn’t remove our responsibility.

A service gap was still a service gap, and the contractual consequences remained available to the customer.

At the same time, the agreed payment timelines weren’t being consistently met.

That created an uncomfortable commercial situation.

The contract gave the customer a mechanism to hold us accountable for service deficiencies.

It also gave us contractual protection when the customer’s obligations weren’t being met, including the ability to exit the relationship.

Legally, those were separate obligations.

Commercially, however, treating accountability as if it travelled in only one direction wasn’t going to create a sustainable relationship.

Exiting wasn’t an attractive answer either.

This was an important customer whose presence itself carried considerable credibility in the market.

There were also outstanding receivables to protect, and terminating the relationship could have made their recovery operationally more difficult even where the contractual position remained protected.

And exiting wouldn’t have solved the underlying problem.

So the conversation moved away from:

Which clause can each side enforce against the other?

Towards:

What does each side need to do for the relationship to work as the contract originally intended?

That distinction mattered.

We didn’t argue that a delayed payment legally erased a service deficiency.

Nor could a service deficiency make the customer’s payment commitment irrelevant.

Instead, both sides acknowledged that the relationship needed symmetrical accountability.

For an agreed period, both sides stepped back from pursuing the respective contractual consequences while returning focus to the underlying obligations.

The customer restored payment discipline.

That improved the conditions under which we could deploy better resources and strengthen service continuity.

Our responsibility, in turn, was to improve delivery and reduce the service gaps that had created the penalty exposure.

The relationship stabilised.

What stayed with me wasn’t the avoidance of a penalty.

It was the difference between having contractual protection and knowing how to use it commercially.

Contracts are necessary because relationships need clearly defined rights, obligations and remedies.

But commercial governance cannot become:

your obligations are enforceable; mine are negotiable.

Equally, reciprocity doesn’t mean that one breach automatically cancels another.

It means both parties remain accountable for what they committed to.

Sometimes protecting the business means enforcing a contractual remedy.

Sometimes it means exiting.

And sometimes it means recognising that the stronger outcome is to restore symmetrical accountability before exercising the remedies available to either side.

Because the objective of commercial governance isn’t simply to establish who has the right to invoke a clause.

It is to create a relationship in which neither side needs to.

Sometimes repeated leadership changes look like a people problem.

Different leader. Same mandate. Similar outcome.

At some point, another question becomes worth asking:

What does every new leader keep inheriting unchanged — and why does it remain unchanged?

I have encountered versions of this in two businesses from completely different industries.

In the first, the business had struggled to establish sustained growth.

One longer-tenured leader had eventually taken the portfolio to 18 customers across 23 locations.

But customer count wasn’t the whole picture.

A significant part of that portfolio sat in businesses with weak economics — some recoverable through cost correction, some requiring a different commercial equation, and some actually destroying value.

The established approach to acquisition had largely been account-by-account.

Pursue a customer. Try to close the business. Work towards the commercial terms needed to win it.

The problem was that winning the customer and winning good business were not necessarily the same thing.

So growth couldn’t simply mean doing more of what had already been done.

The portfolio economics had to change.

Recurring operational weaknesses needed structural solutions.

Capability had to be built deeper into the team.

Delivery assumptions that restricted commercially viable opportunities had to be challenged.

And important customer relationships needed commercial governance that protected both the relationship and the business.

Those are experiences I have written about separately.

Collectively, however, they changed the conditions under which that business could grow.

The portfolio eventually moved from 18 customers across 23 locations to 49 customers across 65 locations.

Then I encountered a very different version of the same underlying question in another industry.

The corporate business there had remained at 6 customers.

Three had come through senior leadership connections.

The other three had been added by three different people managing the function — one customer each.

But those three relationships were based on a usage-linked commercial model that produced little meaningful revenue.

The issue wasn’t that nobody had ever managed to acquire a customer.

They had.

What hadn’t been created was a mechanism that could repeatedly acquire customers and convert them into meaningful committed business.

This business already had something valuable that wasn’t being fully used as a corporate acquisition channel: relationships with its existing individual customers.

Those relationships provided introductions, references and, just as importantly, intelligence about the organisations they worked for.

That created a different route into corporate accounts.

Existing customer relationships began opening doors to employers. Those relationships created further references, and the acquisition mechanism gradually became repeatable.

Approximately 75% of the subsequent corporate business came through this route, with much of the balance coming through references generated by those relationships.

But acquisition alone still wasn’t enough.

The commercial model also had to change.

For new partnerships, usage-linked arrangements gave way to committed capacity, creating a much stronger revenue construct.

The corporate portfolio eventually grew from 6 customers to 33.

Two businesses.

Different industries. Different problems. Different interventions.

There was another similarity.

Both were mandates that had seen repeated leadership changes before I took responsibility for them.

I subsequently remained with one for 4.7 years and the other for 4 years.

The duration isn’t particularly interesting by itself.

What matters to me is what happened during it.

The decisions weren’t recommendations handed over for someone else to execute. I remained accountable while the commercial and operating changes were implemented, tested, corrected and eventually translated into growth.

That reinforced something important for me about leadership.

A leader doesn’t only inherit a business. A leader also inherits responsibility for questioning what is preventing that business from moving forward.

Sometimes the constraint is the economics of the business being won.

Sometimes there is no repeatable acquisition mechanism.

Sometimes the commercial model itself is wrong.

Sometimes operations cannot reliably support growth.

And sometimes several of these problems are sitting underneath the same leadership mandate.

The inherited conditions may explain why a mandate is difficult.

But identifying those conditions, deciding which ones need to change and then changing them is part of the mandate itself.

That distinction matters when leadership keeps changing but the business continues producing similar outcomes.

At some point, the question shouldn’t only be:

“Who should lead this business?”

It should also be:

“What does the leader need to identify and change so that this business stops producing the same outcome?”

Because a new leader can create a fresh start.

Changing what keeps holding the business back — and remaining accountable for what happens after the change — is what can create a different trajectory.