Support for the decisions that change a business.

Strategy and business planning

A clear direction needs decisions about priorities, people and money.

You may have an agreed ambition but too many initiatives competing for the same resources. Or a change in ownership, leadership or market conditions may mean the old plan no longer makes sense.

I help you examine the options, decide where to focus and translate those choices into a business plan. This includes what to stop, where partnerships may help, and what the direction means for departments and managers.

Organisation and management responsibilities

Make the structure fit the work you need to do.

Rapid growth can leave decisions concentrated in a few hands. A reduced or changing workload can leave costs and management layers that no longer fit. Both situations call for a clear view of the work, the skills needed and who should decide what.

I work with leadership to compare options and design changes your team can carry out. That can mean simplifying responsibilities, strengthening the next layer of management, redeploying capacity or reshaping parts of the organisation. I work alongside your HR and other specialists where they are needed.

Budgets, commercial decisions and project performance

See what the work is likely to earn, what it needs and where action is overdue.

A full order book can still hide weak margins, unrealistic capacity assumptions and cash pressure. Project teams and finance may also be working with different views of the same job.

I help connect budgets, forecasts and commercial decisions to the work being delivered. That can include how you assess opportunities, price specialist work, approve changes and report project performance to management and the board.

Support for managing directors and management teams

An independent sounding board while you lead the work.

New responsibilities, difficult changes and conflicting expectations can be hard to work through inside the usual reporting lines. Sometimes you need an experienced sounding board and a place to think through a decision before taking it to the team.

I support leaders through real management situations: clarifying priorities, preparing difficult discussions, establishing responsibilities and developing managers as they take on more authority.

The work can include individual sessions, team discussions and support alongside a wider assignment. We agree the purpose and frequency around the decisions you are facing.

ERP and business systems

Prepare the business before committing it to a new system.

The reporting is no longer reliable enough, information is entered more than once, or the current system makes ordinary work harder than it should be. A replacement may help, but the business first needs to agree what must improve and how the work should run.

I support the business side of system selection and implementation: clarifying processes and requirements, evaluating options, establishing responsibilities and preparing the team for the change.

I have led three ERP implementations on the business side. If you want to prepare with your own team first, read The Software Is Not the Problem, my ERP implementation guide.

Practical AI advice

Find useful applications for AI and a sensible way to test them.

AI may help with repeated work, finding information or preparing a first draft. The useful question is where it can improve a real task in your business, with an acceptable level of checking, cost and effort.

I help management and operational teams examine those opportunities, rank them and plan a first pilot. We start with the work people do and what a better result would look like.

Areas worth investigating include finding relevant material in approved project documents, supporting bid preparation, drafting recurring report sections and making specialist knowledge easier to find. The right starting point depends on your processes and information.

My role is to connect business priorities, the way people work and the decisions needed to move forward. Where specialist technical or compliance expertise is needed, we identify it as part of the plan. I am developing Bid Advisor, an AI tool for bid and proposal work, separately from client advice.