Who I work with
The methods are sector-agnostic, but the deepest experience is where quality, volume and governance intersect. If your business lives or dies on how well the work gets done, you are in the right place.
Why these sectors
The disciplines I bring do not belong to any one industry. Measuring how work really flows, making quality a property of the system rather than of the people who happen to be careful, installing the cadence and governance that let leadership steer — these apply anywhere operations carry the load. So why list sectors at all? Because experience compounds. In the five below I have run operations at scale, seen exactly how they break, and learned what holds them together under pressure. That means faster diagnosis and fewer assumptions to test. The list is not a fence; it is where I can be useful fastest.
What these sectors share matters more than what separates them. In each, operations are not a support function — they are the product. A newsroom sells throughput at a standard; an agency sells a delivered promise; a shared-services centre sells consistency; a scaling company is trying to keep its quality intact as it grows; a multi-entity enterprise is trying to run one process well across many places. All of them live on volume, on quality as the thing the customer actually buys, and on leadership being able to see trouble before it becomes expensive. Read each page for the specific failure modes — but the underlying pattern, and the way out of it, is the same.
Media & newsrooms
Digital publishers and high-velocity content operations.
What tends to break
Output is capped by how work moves through the team — invisible queues, late quality checks, no real-time view of throughput.
How I help
Redesigning the production model so throughput multiplies without errors — the work that took one newsroom to ~400 stories a day.
Advertising & agencies
Global agencies and in-house media teams running delivery at scale.
What tends to break
Delivery shortfalls surface late and become makegoods; quality varies across teams and markets; margin leaks through rework.
How I help
Staged QA frameworks and quality governance built to run at volume — the approach that protected USD 20M+ in client billings.
BPO, GBS & shared services
Delivery centres and global business services serving many clients.
What tends to break
Quality is asserted, not measured; SLAs slip under load; leadership can’t see across clients until it’s a problem.
How I help
A defined standard, honest measurement, and the governance and BI that keep scores consistent across hundreds of clients.
Scaling & founder-led companies
Companies between roughly 50 and 500 people that have outgrown improvisation.
What tends to break
The founder has become the operating system — decisions queue, quality depends on a few people, growth feels harder.
How I help
An operating cadence, clear ownership and governance so the business runs without the founder in every decision — then handed back.
Multi-entity & enterprise operations
Larger organisations running the same processes across many entities or markets.
What tends to break
Processes accrete differently in every entity; cycles run long; there’s no single trusted view of performance.
How I help
Standardised, re-engineered processes and a single source of truth — work that compressed a billing cycle from two months to fifteen days.
The pattern beneath the sectors
Operations as the product, not the back office
In an operations-heavy business, the way work gets done is not a cost to be managed out of sight — it is the thing the customer is paying for. A reader is buying a newsroom’s throughput and reliability. A client is buying an agency’s delivered guarantee. A counterparty is buying a delivery centre’s consistency. When operations are the product, an operating flaw is not an internal inconvenience; it is a defect in what you sell. That reframing is where my work starts in every sector — treating the operating model with the seriousness usually reserved for the product, because in these businesses it is the product.
Volume turns small flaws into large numbers
The sectors here all run at volume, and volume changes the arithmetic of quality. A 95% quality score sounds healthy until you multiply the missing five points across hundreds of thousands of transactions, at which point it is a steady stream of defects reaching customers. A process step that wastes a few minutes is trivial once and serious ten thousand times. This is why asserted quality is dangerous at scale and measured quality is valuable: the aggregate is what the comforting percentage hides. Much of my work is making leadership feel the absolute number behind the rate — and then designing out the systemic causes that produce it.
Quality has to be a property of the system
In a craft business, quality can rest on a few careful people. In a volume operation, it cannot — the heroes run out, get stretched thin, or leave and take the tacit standard with them. Across every sector here, the same shift is required: quality has to move from depending on who is watching to being built into how the work is designed. That means a defined standard that means the same thing everywhere it is measured, checks placed where defects actually originate, and root causes designed out rather than inspected harder for. It is the difference between a business that cleans up periodically and one that does not let the mess accumulate.
Leadership usually sees problems too late
The recurring failure across these industries is not carelessness; it is latency. Leadership steers on lagging numbers — last month’s output, this quarter’s churn — that describe a result after it has already happened and the cost is sunk. By the time a problem reaches a report, it has cost money and goodwill. The fix is the same wherever it applies: find the leading indicators that move before the result does — queue depth before a missed SLA, pacing before a makegood, backlog before a missed deadline — and wire them to clear decision rights so someone acts while there is still time. That lead time is often the whole game.
The same discipline, learned locally each time
The craft transfers across sectors; the specifics never do, and I do not pretend otherwise. A newsroom and a billing function look nothing alike, yet both are production lines where work queues between steps and quality is set by the design of the flow. My job is to see past the domain to the operating structure underneath, and then to learn the particular content of your business before changing anything. The honest model is partnership: I bring the operating rigour, your team brings the domain knowledge, and the diagnosis is built from both. That is why these sector pages describe patterns, not prescriptions — the prescription is written with you.
Questions about fit
What founders and operators ask most often when working out whether their sector — and their situation — is one I can actually help.
No. The methods are sector-agnostic — measuring how work actually flows, making quality a property of the system, installing the cadence and governance that let leadership steer. The five sectors listed are simply where my own experience runs deepest, which means faster diagnosis and fewer assumptions to test. But the underlying problem is the same wherever operations carry the load: work queues between steps, quality depends on a few people, and leadership sees problems too late. If your business lives or dies on how well the work gets done, the discipline transfers, even if your sector is not named here.
Because they share a defining trait: operations are not a support function in them, they are the product. A newsroom, an agency, a delivery centre, a scaling founder-led company, a multi-entity enterprise — in each, the quality and consistency of how work gets done is what the customer is actually buying. That is also where I have spent nineteen years, most recently running Business Excellence at Publicis Groupe across 500+ clients and teams of 2,000+. These are the environments where I can be useful fastest, because I have seen how they break and what holds them together at scale.
The operating discipline does; the surface detail does not, and I do not pretend otherwise. A newsroom and a billing function look nothing alike, but both are production lines where work queues between steps and quality is set by the design of the flow. The transferable craft is in seeing past the domain to the operating structure underneath — where the waiting is, where the defects originate, where decisions stall. What I always learn locally is the specific content of the work. The first weeks of any engagement are spent understanding your particular reality before changing anything, precisely so the method lands on how your business actually runs.
Three things. First, volume — the same work is done many times, so small inefficiencies and small defect rates compound into large numbers. Second, quality as the product — consistency is what the customer pays for, which makes an asserted standard dangerous and a measured one valuable. Third, a visibility gap — leadership tends to see problems only after they have cost money, because the metrics are lagging and the reporting does not reconcile. Wherever those three are present, the same operating disciplines apply: re-engineer the flow, make quality a property of the system, and install governance that surfaces problems while they are still cheap to fix.
Each sector page is tied to the engagement that most often fits it — process transformation for media and multi-entity enterprises, Business Excellence for agencies, operations governance for shared services, the full Fractional COO role for scaling founder-led companies. But that is a starting point, not a rule. The right service depends on the specific problem you can feel, which is why almost every engagement opens with a short diagnostic. The sector tells me where the usual failure modes sit; the diagnostic tells both of us which one is actually biting in your business, and in what order to address it.
Yes. The practice is remote-first by default and the work is regularly cross-border — much of my experience has been with global operations spanning many markets. On-site time is used where it earns its place: the diagnostic, key operating reviews, or a moment that needs people in a room. Much of what I install — cadence, clear ownership, a trusted scorecard — matters even more in a distributed organisation, because distance punishes ambiguity. Sector and geography matter far less than whether operations carry the business and have stopped scaling cleanly.
In the five sectors here, a great deal — I have run operations in them at scale and can recognise the usual failure modes quickly, which shortens diagnosis. Outside them, I bring the operating discipline rather than domain expertise, and I am explicit about that. The honest model is partnership: I supply the operating craft and the rigour, your team supplies the domain knowledge, and the diagnosis is built from both. An operator who claims instant expertise in an industry they have never run is selling confidence, not competence. What travels is the method; what I learn from you is the specifics.
Yes. Every number cited — a newsroom’s throughput quadrupled to roughly 400 stories a day, more than USD 20 million in billings protected, quality lifted from 95% to 99% across 2,000+ campaigns and 450 clients, a billing cycle compressed from two months to fifteen days across 75 entities — comes from real work and is set against the sector it happened in. Where a client is held in confidence, the organisation is described by role and scale rather than named, but the figures are not softened. The case studies put the full narrative against each one. Measured proof is the point; unverifiable claims are not.
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