The Part No One Could See

Let me reintroduce myself, because the work has changed and the introduction should change with it.

For three decades I have worked inside business at close to every level. I trained as a CFA and spent my early career as a lead analyst and corporate broker, taking technology companies public, among them Wolfson Microelectronics and EEMS, and sitting on the other side of the table advising acquirers such as GB Group and Smurfit Kappa. I went on to hold the senior seats, CFO of an AIM listed company where I ran an acquisition and its integration, and CFO, COO and CTO roles across private technology businesses, raising money from seed through to Series B and taking a loss making company and making it profitable. I have raised more than a billion in equity across that career. The thread running through all of it was a particular kind of seeing. In 1997 I wrote an extended essay on artificial neural networks. In 2006 I was pointing people towards ARM and ASML. Spotting the pattern early, and connecting dots other people had not yet joined, was the thing I was known for.

It is worth saying all of that plainly, because of what it did not protect me from.

On the day I turned forty my blood sugar reached 23, on a scale where four to five is normal. My eyesight had collapsed from minus six to minus twelve. I spent two days in hospital on a drip while doctors stabilised something that had not failed overnight, whatever the timing suggested. It had been building for years, and I had been overriding it for just as long, because underneath everything I did sat a single belief I had never once said out loud. If I slowed down, everything would fall apart. The career rewarded that belief at every turn. People called it drive, ambition, discipline, high standards. My body kept a quieter account, and at forty it called the balance in.

I reversed the diabetes and came off all the medication within three months. I want to hold that fact still, because of what followed it. For the next four years I went on running at roughly the same pace, on roughly the same belief, in the body that belief had already broken once. The medical lesson had not reached the part of me that actually ran the show. The override had survived the reversal.

It ended on a family holiday. My sister looked at me and told me, in plain terms, that I was not well, and that I needed to stop holding everything and everyone else responsible for where I had ended up, because I was a grown man and the arrangement was mine. There was nowhere in that sentence to hide. From the outside the job still looked excellent and the life still looked enviable. The part that was not working was the part no one could see, and the one person who could see it said it out loud at exactly the right moment.

What I understood, slowly, is that the person who had built the career was not the person who could carry what came next. The capability that got me to forty was the very thing keeping me stuck at forty. That is not a comfortable thing to learn about yourself when your whole identity rests on being the capable one. The work of changing it took far longer than the medical reversal had, and it is the part I rarely put into numbers, because it does not reduce to them.

Here is why I am telling you this rather than leaving it in a memoir. The shape of that story turns out to be portable. I see it constantly in the founders I now work with. A business hits a ceiling, and everyone assumes the answer sits in the strategy, the next hire, the new market. Sometimes it does. Often the business is stuck on the same thing I was stuck on, the person running it, who has been overriding the signals for years because overriding has always worked. The plan and the operator are both real problems, and they have to be worked on together, because a business cannot outgrow the person running it.

So I keep a deliberately small practice now, a dozen or so founders at a time, sitting beside them as the one partner to both the company and the person who runs it. The same instinct for spotting the pattern early, turned outward to the business and honestly inward to the operator.

If your business has hit a ceiling and some part of you suspects it is not only the strategy, that is the conversation worth having. The free call is the simplest place to begin, and for some founders the One-Day or Three-Day workshop is where we map the whole picture properly. Thirty minutes, free, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

Continue reading: The Exit You Cannot Take →

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