Two paths from here. One is a letter about systems and what to do when the team you have can’t solve the problem you can see. The other is a different conversation about what you actually want to do all day and what it would take to build a life that makes that possible.
Keep reading for the first. Start here for the second →
Dear CEO,
Here’s what I believe, up front.
Your people are good. The system is broken. The problem isn’t that the team is underperforming, it’s that they’re working inside something that was built for a different stage of the company. You don’t need to replace them. You need to fix the system and leave the team better than you found it.
I don’t bring a team. I don’t run you a workplan. I own the outcome and I leave when it’s done.
I spent twelve years at Amazon. I ran Finance for FBA Worldwide as it grew from twenty billion to a hundred billion in sales and ten-times’d operating profit. I know what it takes to build operational systems that hold weight when the business is doubling.
Then I was CFO of Plenty Unlimited, a vertical farming company with SoftBank on the cap table. We went into Chapter 11 and came out ninety days later with the company intact and insider financing committed to the next round. Most restructurings don’t end that way.
Now I take on specific problems for specific companies. A supply chain that won’t scale. An operation that can’t find the leverage in its own numbers. A finance function that outgrew its systems.
Problems like these don’t get better on their own. They get more expensive.
Book an hour. Tell me what you’re carrying. We’ll know by the end of the call whether I’m the right person to solve it.
