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

Q2 - Good People, Wrong Roles

When a senior appointment fails, the instinct is to look for the flaw in the person. The reality is less dramatic and more useful: genuinely toxic individuals account for fewer than 5% of the cases we see. The far larger problem is capable, experienced, decent people placed in roles that do not suit them.

The cost is rarely the recruitment fee. At chief executive level, the full cost of a failed appointment runs to many times base salary, most of it invisible at the time. Good People, Wrong Roles draws together thirteen weeks on what actually predicts senior performance, and why boards so often misjudge it.

Q1 - The People Dimension of Transactions

A data room documents a business thoroughly: the financial model, the contracts, the commercial story, the organisation chart. What it rarely documents is whether the management team can actually deliver the plan on which the valuation rests.

Management surprises now affect around 35% of deals, up from 25% two decades ago, yet deal teams still spend barely a quarter of their time on people and organisation. The attention has not followed the risk. Where the Risk Really Lives draws together twelve weeks on the people dimension of transactions - and where most of the available value goes unclaimed.

2025 Series

Q4: Where Growth Goes to Stall: The People Pain Points Nobody Owns

The most expensive problems in a growth company rarely announce themselves. Not the crises that fill a board agenda, but the chronic constraints everyone half-recognises and nobody quite owns - a board that cannot align, a team too stretched to think, a structure that fights the strategy. None of it is news. That is exactly why it persists.

Management is widely held to drive around two-thirds of investment performance, yet the capability to address management problems remains the least developed part of most businesses. Where Growth Goes to Stall draws together thirteen weeks on the pain points that quietly drain value.

Q3: The "How" Behind the Numbers: Where Value Lives Across the Investment Lifecycle

Every investor-backed company is run against two stories. The first is visible: revenue, margin, the value creation plan, the targets everyone tracks. The second is quieter and largely undocumented - whether the team beneath the numbers can actually deliver any of it. Boards spend most of their attention on the first. Value is won or lost in the second.

Over four quarters, Unlocking Potential has followed this gap across the investment lifecycle: the deal, the boardroom, the senior appointment and the run to exit. This first synthesis, The "How" Behind the Numbers, starts where the money does, and asks why management bandwidth - not capital or ambition - is so often the real constraint on growth. It explores where the value lives, and why so few boards go looking.

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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