Three decades of business experience, narrowed now to a single question: is this business worth what everyone assumes it's worth, and if not, what changes that before the buyer finds out first.

The journey. I started in technology leadership, then ran my own web development company. By 2009, the partnership had turned toxic, and I was more interested in getting out than in getting the price right. I sold my shares, not the business, and I didn't do the best job of it. It's cost me a few sleepless nights since, turning over what I could have done differently.

In 2016 I pivoted an existing strategy consultancy entirely into OKRs, against the advice of almost everyone I asked. It worked. I co-created Auxin OKR, which was acquired by Quantive, and I'm the author of Earn the Right: Leading with Strategic Intelligence, now in its second edition.

Along the way, I worked with Chargebee's team on their OKR foundation and champion network, around 2020 to 2021, right as the business hit its defining scaling phase. Months later, they crossed a billion-dollar valuation. By the following year, they'd reached $3.5 billion. I'm not claiming credit for that. Hundreds of people built that outcome. But the architecture we put in place together, at exactly that inflection point, was mine to build, and it held.

That's the bridge I keep coming back to. Focus. The right people. Values that align, not just get stated in a slide deck. A clear vision. Then, and only then, the method. Those principles don't change depending on which end of a business's journey you're standing at. I've spent years helping companies start that journey well. Now I want to help more of them finish it the same way. I currently work with a private equity house in London on the exit-readiness of one of their portfolio companies, applying that same architecture to an ending instead of a beginning. That work is where Keystone came from.

The evolution. The turning point in how I do this work came through the Identity Blueprint, Ben Lamorte's diagnostic of values, strengths and direction, which I initially approached as a method to use with clients. What it surfaced in me was more direct. I'd gradually accepted less than I used to, in places where I used to hold a higher standard. The Blueprint didn't tell me anything I didn't already know. It named what I'd stopped looking at.

What I do now. I run Keystone, a twelve-to-twenty-four month programme that gets a business ready to be sold well, not just sold. [Read more →] I also coach individual leaders one-to-one, through The Why Room, built on the Identity Blueprint. [Read more →]

I help people earn the right to the next chapter, not by performing certainty, but by doing the work that makes certainty worth having.