A cost base that couldn't survive the next round.
The product worked and the deals were closing. What didn't work was the economics underneath each deployment — and the business was about to take those economics into three countries at once. I took the interim COO seat, reporting to the CEO.
The problem
A margin problem that expansion would have multiplied rather than outgrown.
Every deployment cost too much. The revenue was real and growing, but the cost of delivering each installation put the gross margin somewhere no investor was going to fund. Growth was making the shape of the problem bigger, not better.
The process had never been designed. It had accumulated — each step added by someone solving a real problem at the time, none of it ever reviewed as a whole. That is the normal state of a business that has been busy, and it is invisible from inside.
Three markets were about to open at once. UK, France and Italy, simultaneously. Exporting an undesigned process into three countries would have created three variants of it inside a year, each drifting on its own.
What I did
Rebuilt rather than trimmed. You cannot get to 60% by negotiating with suppliers.
Took the deployment process apart end to end. Every step costed, and each one tested against whether it still needed to exist at the current size of the business. A meaningful share of the cost was in steps nobody had questioned since they were introduced.
Rebuilt it as a designed process. Not a trimmed version of the old one — a different sequence, with the expensive steps either removed, moved earlier where they were cheaper, or absorbed into work already happening.
Built the operating frameworks for three markets. One way of running a deployment, defined well enough to be executed in the UK, France and Italy simultaneously without three local variants emerging.
Held the P&L view throughout. The goal was never cost reduction for its own sake — it was a gross margin profile the business could raise against. That framing decides which costs are worth attacking and which are load-bearing.
What changed
Unit costs fell 60%. Structurally, through process design rather than procurement — which means it held after I left rather than drifting back.
The business became fundable on its margin profile. That was the actual objective, and it is the reason this is the strongest single number I have.
Three markets opened on one operating model. Simultaneous entry into the UK, France and Italy, running the same defined process rather than three interpretations of it.
This is the engagement that taught me the pattern I now look for first: when revenue is growing and margin isn't, the problem is almost never the thing everyone is looking at. It's in a process that accumulated rather than being designed, and it's invisible from inside because everyone remembers why each individual step was added. That is the same instinct behind the diagnostic I now run in the first two weeks of any engagement.
If revenue is growing and margin isn't, the answer is usually further upstream.
Thirty minutes. No brief required. We'll work out where your customer lifecycle is losing money and whether it's a problem I can fix — and if it isn't a fit, I'll tell you inside the first ten minutes.