Unlocking Potential helps CEOs, Chairs and investors elevate team and organisational effectiveness to drive growth
Our weekly newsletters dedicated to CEO/Founders and Chairs with content on the team and organisational aspects of scaling and building value.
2026 Series
Q1 - Making Transactions Work: The People Dimension
Examined what most transaction processes overlook: the human and organisational factors that ultimately determine whether deals create or destroy value. Despite two decades of supposedly improved processes, management surprises affect 35% of transactions, up from 25% in 2004. More scrutiny has not meant fewer mistakes.
The twelve articles covered the full transaction arc. Early pieces examined what sophisticated buyers actually assess - and why management teams consistently underprepare on organisational evidence rather than financial performance. Subsequent articles addressed the bandwidth costs of deal processes, the revealing signal of second-tier strength, and the particular dilemmas facing the CEO who stays after completion. Later pieces explored the Chair's often underestimated transaction role, the costly habits of the first hundred days post-deal, and how information memoranda routinely fail to evidence execution capability. Two further articles examined AI's emerging role in due diligence and boardroom decision-making - as a thinking partner rather than a productivity tool.
2025 Series
Q4: The most expensive problems in mid-market growth companies aren't sudden crises - they're the persistent constraints that everyone acknowledges, nobody quite owns, and which quietly drain enterprise value whilst management attention focuses elsewhere.
The second quarterly series of Unlocking Potential took thirteen specific pain points and examines both their real cost and what pragmatic action actually looks like.
Topics range across the terrain that growth company leaders consistently find hardest to address systematically: board effectiveness and governance failures; managing team and organisational challenges through transactions; building and executing a credible growth strategy; the dynamics of private equity relationships; the recurring challenge of getting senior appointments right; organisational culture and how change actually happens; CEO succession and the evolving demands of the founder role; management structure; and how exit readiness exposes weaknesses that were there all along.
The connecting thread is straightforward: organisational weakness rarely announces itself. It accumulates quietly - eroding bandwidth, slowing decisions, and compounding the distance between strategy and execution.
Q3: The first quarterly cycle of Unlocking Potential articles explored an overall organising idea: that the difference between growth companies which deliver on their potential and those which don't rarely lies in the quality of their strategy or the ambition of their plans. It lies in the organisational infrastructure underneath.
Across thirteen articles, the series deepens the themes of the Unlocking Potential handbook, moving from diagnosis to practical action. Topics include the hidden "organisational balance sheet" that most CEOs never measure; the bandwidth trap that quietly undermines execution; the paradox at the heart of role clarity; and how to tell a genuine strategy from a collection of wishful goals. The series goes on to explore why value creation plans so often become value destruction, what "value enablement" means in practice, and how to extract more useful insight from the due diligence process. Later articles address board dilemmas, performance accountability, and the particular challenges of growth at scale.
Every week we produce a newsletter ‘Unlocking Potential’ dedicated to CEO/Founders and Chairs with content on the team and organisational aspects of scaling and building value.
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