Hi, I'm Jonathan.
I'm a leader and a doer. You can hire me by the day when you need help with something important. Either you don't have the time, or your team is missing the skills.
- A problem solved
- A pain point eliminated
- An initiative stood up
- A team led
I work inside the business alongside you, and I answer for the result.
How the fee works is up to you. It can follow the days, a project, a milestone or the result.
- Thirty years of running privately held startup, scale-up and established businesses.
- Melbourne based, working nationally.
I work in privately held businesses where the people accountable are reachable.
My clients usually have between 10 and 100 staff, and somewhere between $2M and $50M in turnover. Sometimes the founder is still running things. Sometimes a management team has been installed and is not performing. Sometimes ownership is shared and the owners want different things from it.
The structure matters less than whether I can sit down with whoever is accountable, and whether a decision can be made without travelling through layers of approval first.
Most of my work is in Melbourne and greater Melbourne, because being on site regularly is part of how I work. I do take engagements elsewhere in Australia.
A business this size needs someone who understands what is at stake at this size. Budgets are tight, and there is very little safety net under a bad decision. The functions sit on top of one another, so a change in one turns up quickly in the others. The same handful of people problems keeps coming round.
That understanding comes from having run businesses of this size. It is something a top end of town consultant working with corporates simply cannot land.
Most of what holds a business back is already known to the people running it.
You will recognise one or two of these. Nobody has all of them, and nobody needs to read the whole list.
- New entrants taking share, and competitors who look cheaper or quicker
- Pressure to do something about AI with no capacity to work out what is real
- Industry or regulatory change coming that nobody has had time to get in front of
- No real innovation in the business for a while now
- Processes built for a business half this size that were never rebuilt
- Profit out of step with revenue movement
- No working financial model of the business
- Measurement not tied to the model; levers pulled blindly
- Discounting to win work; pricing by feel
- Blockers to releasing cash held up in debtors, stock and work in progress
- Work won faster than it can be delivered, and quality slipping as volume rises
- Several systems and a set of spreadsheets holding it together
- An ERP or CRM that was bought and never properly landed
- An acquisition or a second site that was never integrated, so there are two ways of doing everything
- A platform or a single supplier the business cannot operate without
- A technology change that stalled and that nobody mentions now
- Initiatives announced and quietly dropped
- Advice that was paid for and never acted on
- New processes that people had worked around within a month
- A team that no longer expects the next one to land either
- Nothing moves while the owner is away, so a holiday is not really a holiday
- No obvious second in command
- A management team that fitted the business when it was half this size
- Roles that stay open for months in a market where the right people are hard to find
- Hires that do not work out once the role is finally filled
- Working harder than five years ago for the same money or less
- No visible pathway to stepping back or retiring
- Profitable but hard to sell, because it depends on one person, and worth less to a buyer than it feels like it is worth
- Too much revenue sitting in one or two accounts
- A bank, insurer or major customer asking for reporting the business does not have
Almost everything on that list is well understood work that a competent team could do, given the room. The people who could take it on are already fully committed, and each problem needs senior attention over months.
So it gets scoped and moved to the next quarter, then moved again, and the cost of that accrues quietly. Where something was started and then stalled, the team stops expecting the next one to land.
Execute 1000 One Percenters
My philosophy for success is simple. When I lead a business, a function or a project, I believe that a thousand small improvements will beat one grand plan, every time. This is especially true when the grand plan is so expansive that it becomes too difficult to execute.
A one percent gain sounds like nothing. It is a quote priced properly, a handover that does not drop anything, or a meeting that ends with someone owning the next step. It's a process tightened up. It's the team member who now 'gets it' and does that key system update they kept forgetting. Find a thousand of them across culture, workflow, communication and execution, and you have a different company.
Where I start is set by what unlocks the next thing, not by function and not by what is easiest to begin. So the first weeks can look unglamorous, because that work is what everything else has been waiting on.
I ensure everyone contributes. The improvements ultimately come from the people doing the work, which is why I want to be in the building rather than sending you a report. Where a business is not performing, it tends to show up in its people, and rarely because they are poor. What has been short is management attention, starting with a plain account of what good looks like.
None of this means I can't run with the grand plan and make it work. Where something needs ripping out I will say so, and now and again there is a ten percenter sitting in plain sight. But be sceptical of anyone selling you a silver bullet. You have done a lot right to get where you are, and the baby rarely needs to go out with the bathwater.
You are not short of advice. Very few businesses are.
There is more of it available now than there has ever been, and a fair amount of it is good. The harder part is knowing which of it applies to your business, and then getting it done. Either can be short through lack of experience, lack of capability, or simply not enough hours in the day.
It starts with discovery.
Three to five days. I need access to the systems and an org chart, and I will talk to the people who know how things actually work. Very little of it comes out of your diary, because your time is the scarcest thing in the building.
What comes out of it is what the business actually needs from me: which shape the work takes, how much of my week it wants, what that costs, and how it can be paid for and tied to results.
Discovery is what sets the shape of the engagement, which is why there is no standard length quoted anywhere on this page. What the work needs is a finding, not a starting assumption.
The capability does not have to be bought whole.
The reason work like this goes unresourced is that it gets priced as a full time hire and stops there. A seat held for part of the week puts the same experience in your leadership team for a fraction of what the full time equivalent costs, and you carry as much of it as the business wants. It is also available now, with none of the months of recruiting.
I work through my own company as an independent contractor, whether the seat runs for a quarter or for years. What you take on is an engagement rather than a position on the payroll, so the size and shape of it can move with the business without any of it becoming a personnel decision.
The work also goes into the business through the people already there. Hard to find skills get added where they are missing, the team you have gets lifted rather than replaced, and the new ways of working end up held by your own people.
What the work costs depends on what the work turns out to be, and that is what discovery is for. Day rates, fixed prices against defined milestones, fees linked to outcomes, funding drawn from what the work releases: any of that is on the table, in whatever combination fits your circumstances and how you want to hold the risk. Setting it out as packages would mean choosing your situation for you before either of us knows what it is.
Six engagements, told without the names.
My clients are entitled to their privacy, but references and the detail behind any of the work are available in conversation.
Point me at anything on your to-do list.
The four areas below cover work I have built, led or run myself. Not much can come up that I have not had to deal with somewhere in my career, and the parts I have not seen before are the parts I work out. If it is something a leadership team would own, it is in scope.
Why hiring your way to it is harder than it looks
The first is the drain on your own time. Anyone new is assumed to mean weeks of explaining the business, sitting in sessions and being the source for every answer. If you are already the bottleneck, that alone is reason enough to do nothing.
The second runs the other way. Someone who does not need managing can also spend weeks following the wrong threads and bill for it. Running without constant input and still landing in the right places is a skill in itself.
An engagement answers all of it. It costs a fraction of the permanent hire, it is available now, it takes very little of your time to start, and because it is an engagement rather than a position, you hold it for exactly as long as it is worth holding.
You can stop at any point, and you only pay for what has been done.
You can also see the work. It turns up every day, and you will know what it is worth long before anyone needs to have a conversation about it. If it ever stops being worth what it costs, I will say so rather than wait for you to raise it.
“We're okay for now. We'll handle it ourselves.”
Usually true, and usually meant. Most of what is on the list sits well within your team's ability. What tends to be short is capacity.
There is nobody with room to pick it up, so the item moves to next quarter for reasons that are good each time. Nothing forces the question to come back, so a year later the same sentence is still available.
The choice you are actually making is between doing something different and having another year like the last one. A few days of discovery would tell you whether it is worth doing anything.
“You're a generalist. You don't know my industry.”
The industry knowledge sits with you and your people, and more of it is rarely what is missing.
Large organisations homogenise as they corporatise, so experience carries across them quickly. Businesses your size have each grown their own way of operating, around their own people and their own history, and what worked in one does not simply transfer.
Industry experience can even get in the way. Someone arriving from a competitor with a proven playbook will often want to roll it out, and what gets skipped is what makes your business different.
I can tell you what your numbers are saying, where cash is stuck, whether your pricing works and whether your people are set up to do well. None of that is industry specific, and I learned it running businesses your size. Where a job needs a genuine specialist, I use your team first, or bring one in and manage them.
Half an hour, confidential, and it costs you nothing.
Tell me roughly what the business does and what is in your way at the moment. If an NDA would make that easier, say so and I will send one through.
