I've spent over twenty years inside the music industry, at EMI, Warner, Napster and SoundCloud, through most of the changes that mattered. I ran Napster through an ownership change and stayed on as CEO for six months after. At SoundCloud I built the global music strategy while the platform was still working out what kind of business it was.

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Most of what reaches me now starts the same way, a business that isn't working the way it should, or one that thinks it has found an opportunity and isn't sure yet. I come in before either of those has settled into a proper brief for a normal consultant.

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I don't need the question fully formed. Half the job is working out whether the question you've brought me is the one that matters. A lot of expensive strategy gets built answering the wrong one.

Music and technology have run through most of my career, from both directions. I sat inside a major label while new technology changed how it worked, then spent years on the technology side of that same shift. I have a decent read on where each side tends to misread the other, and on what a good idea needs before a business can run with it.

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Growth work usually starts with what's already there for me. What a business does well, what its customers keep asking for without quite saying so. The bigger opportunity is often something half-used already, sitting in the business because nobody has pushed it hard enough yet.

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Founders and CEOs bring me in because I've run businesses, not just advised people running them. Most ideas sound fine in a meeting. Fewer are ones you would put your own name against, and after twenty years making that call for myself, I know the difference fairly quickly.

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The shape of the work changes. Sometimes it's a defined project. Other times it's a fractional seat, stepping into a leadership team for a stretch without becoming a permanent hire.

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Get in touch if there's a problem worth solving, or something you cannot yet put a name to.