A cold email became a board seat.
The engine that opened that door is the one I build.
Interim and fractional commercial leadership. CMO and main-board director, PE-backed. Thirty years across technology, consumer and complex services.
I won my last board seat with a cold email.
In 2023 I was running my own consultancy. A fast-growing B2B consultancy, a leader in its sector and privately owned at the time, was a name on my prospect list. I found the managing director through my own research, wrote to him, and he replied.
What followed was a fixed-fee assignment, then three days a week, then four at their request, then eighteen days a month. Marketing came into the remit. Then a directorship, a seat at the board table, and equity when the private equity investment arrived. Nobody keeps buying more days of something that is not working.
Before that I had built and I had held things together. Second employee at a new WPP agency in London, set up to handle the global Dell business, built to sixty people in six months. Managing director of a 200-person content studio across five sites inside The Hut Group, promoted in after the previous leadership team had gone, with the absorption as the job. Deals close on paper. That is the part where the value survives or evaporates.
In between: an agency founded with two partners. Nine years running my own consultancy for O2, Diageo, Dell, Microsoft, Unilever and NatWest. A spell inside Coca-Cola as an in-house entrepreneur launching new brands. Thirty years, across technology, consumer and complex services.
Something commercial has stopped keeping up.
A seat has gone empty and the permanent search will take five months. The pipeline will not wait for it.
Or revenue still runs through three or four people, and it wobbles whenever their attention moves.
Or the board is asking questions the current reporting cannot answer, and marketing is busy in a way nobody can tie to revenue.
None of it is a crisis. That is what makes it easy to leave.
Most operators work on the commercial problem.
Which sounds obvious, and is usually the wrong place to start.
Pipeline instability, forecasts that keep moving, sales and marketing pulling apart: these are usually downstream of something. Unclear ownership. A decision nobody actually made. A strategy agreed in a room and never translated into what anyone does on Monday.
Work only on the symptom and it comes back, in a different shape, one quarter later.
I operate at board altitude and execute at CMO level. I see the cause and the effect, and I work on the right one first.
Build. Run. Hand over.
Build. The engine that finds the work your reputation cannot reach. Targeting, outreach, a funnel with definitions both sales and marketing use, and reporting the board can hold the business to. I have built this from nothing more than once, including a WPP agency taken to sixty people in six months.
Run. Not advice from a distance. I own the function, sit in the operating rhythm, and answer for the outcome. When the new business function underperformed in my last role, I raised it, then took it on.
Hand over. Structure, not dependency. The point of an interim is that the business is better off after they leave, and can tell you exactly how.
I go in as adviser to the chief executive.
I stay to fix what is not working.
You can explain the pipeline in five minutes.
Every quarter, to anyone who asks, including the people who put money in.
Revenue stops depending on which senior person is in the room. Sales and marketing work from the same definitions and the same numbers. Reporting ties to outcomes rather than activity.
Ninety days, agreed in advance.
We agree what those ninety days have to prove. I work four days a week inside the business. We extend if the work has earned it. Most engagements run six months. Some become permanent conversations, and that gets earned through the work rather than negotiated at the door.
A monthly rate, agreed before we start. No open-ended retainer.
If by day ninety you cannot see what has changed, we will both know, and we stop.
I take a small number of engagements at a time.
Six situations, one job.
Any sector. Any ownership structure. UK and Europe, remote or hybrid.
A commercial seat is empty
Your CMO or commercial director has left. I hold the seat, run the function, and hand it to the permanent hire in better condition than they would have found it.
You need cover, done well
Maternity, illness, a long search. Not every engagement is a rebuild and I will not manufacture one. A safe pair of senior hands, with the building credentials in reserve.
Investment has arrived
A new board wants pipeline it can interrogate and reporting that ties spend to outcomes. I have sat in those meetings on the management side of the table.
There is no function to inherit
Revenue built on reputation, referral and a few people who sell. It works, and it has a ceiling. I build the engine that reaches past it.
Something has been acquired
New parent, new operating model, people deciding whether to stay. I have run that from the inside, at 200 people across five sites, after the leadership team had already left.
Marketing is busy, and nobody can say what it produces
Events, content, activity everywhere, accountability nowhere. I make the function answerable to revenue, and I am comfortable being the first person it is answerable through.
The conversation costs an hour.
Bring the situation. I will tell you what I would do with it, including the parts I would not touch.
If the honest answer is that you need a marketing director and not me, I will say so. And I will usually know who.