Not a consultant.
A practitioner.
Forty-five years across four continents inside operating businesses — restructuring, building, and fixing the cash-conversion problems the Big 4 charge you millions to diagnose and then leave you to solve.
The record
Global sales leadership. Hundred-million-pound turnarounds. Post-merger integrations, leveraged buyouts, private equity plays and hostile situations. Two decades serving on boards in an advisory capacity, and fifteen years working in the UAE helping founders, owners and chief executives enter the Middle East.
I have been the person who had to walk into a board and explain something they should have heard about two quarters earlier. That is the experience all of this is built on, and it is why the output is framed for a chair, an investor and an audit committee — because that is who you will face with it.
Why the method exists
The received wisdom is that you cannot know what you will inherit as a chief executive until you land. That is wrong, and believing it costs you the first hundred days you do not have. Around ninety per cent of what a CEO inherits is predictable: numbers you did not build, a board pack of lagging indicators, an operating model that emerged rather than being designed, a board protecting its own positions, and owners with no patience.
Because it is predictable, it can be planned for. That is what Cash Conversion Velocity and the field guide are for.
The book
The Slow Bleed — Why Your Business Is Losing Cash, and It's Not a Sales Problem is the CEO field guide behind every engagement here. Sixteen working tools you run against your own numbers, published by Redline Press in 2026 in hardback and paperback. Every copy carries a code that unlocks The Vault, where the diagnostics run live against your own data.
Elsewhere
I chair and moderate international summits, write Field Notes here, and publish to Substack as The Undefended CEO. Based between Cornwall and Dubai.