Strategic adviser · Educator · Speaker
Independent judgement, alongside yours.
A strategic adviser to owners, CEOs and leadership teams — bringing sound judgement to the decisions that are complex, high-stakes and unclear.
Built as an RAF fighter pilot. Proven as a COO.
Book a 30-minute callWhat I do
I work one to one with senior leaders and their teams.
Not a framework, not a facilitator: an independent view on the decisions that matter, from someone who has had to make them under real consequence.
Who I work with
- Founder
- the business still runs through you, and the next move is bigger than the last.
- Owner
- preparing for growth, succession, investment or restructuring.
- Chief executive
- leading through market uncertainty, growth or change that reaches everything.
- Family-business leader
- where the stakes are personal and the politics are real.
The situation
- The board has its interests.
- The team have their own corners to fight.
- Everyone in the room has a stake in the answer.
But at the end of the day you have to decide, alone.
The most demanding decision environment there is. Twenty kilometres a minute, and wrong is very bad.
It forged a way of deciding that works anywhere, which is why I could walk into a business I’d never run, and deliver.
How I show up
Sixteen years an RAF fighter pilot — a Qualified Weapons Instructor who flew the F/A-18 on exchange with the US Marines. Then more than a decade running and transforming complex operations at scale. Today I advise owners and chief executives, teach on the MBA at Hult International Business School, and write about how good decisions actually get made.
On an engagement, I bring all of it — the lessons from combat missions, the years running a 24/7 world-class operation of 10,000 people, and everything in between. My philosophy is grounded in the demands of combat aviation, where building an accurate picture of reality, staying focused on the mission, and a nuanced application of risk were not assets. They were survival.
Most of what gets called complex isn’t unprecedented — it’s unfamiliar. In the cockpit, and then in business, I’ve usually seen the shape of it before, in one domain or another. That’s what I bring to your situation.
How fighter pilots make hundreds of good decisions a sortie, and how you make yours
How I think.
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Build a usable picture of reality.
Keep what you know, what you assume, and what you hope apart; never let them blur into one set of facts.
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Be clear on what good looks like.
At every step, before the problem or the options define it for you.
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Move in cycles, not big bets.
Shrink the horizon, move towards good, and keep your options open.
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Understand risk properly.
The worst case can happen, so make sure you can survive it, rather than leaning on probabilities.
In practice
Everyone was fixing the wrong thing.
The largest destination-management company in the UAE was failing its customers every day. I’d never run a business like it, but the picture was clear: guests arrived to the wrong rooms, or no room at all. Everyone was trying to fix the reservations process — but it would never be perfect, the business moves too fast, so a better process was the wrong answer.
What was missing was structural. Five departments, and no one owned the day of operations.
So we built it: people from each team, together every morning, running the day as one function instead of five. One of them checked a hundred per cent of the next day’s bookings before anyone travelled, so mistakes were caught the day before they reached a guest.
No extra people. No extra cost. Complaints fell ninety-five per cent.
That’s the work: find what good looks like, and move at it, relentlessly.
The record
dnata · Emirates Group
USD 4.2m annual cost reduction
Running 24/7 airside operations at Dubai International: 10,000+ people, a USD 250m budget.
PA Consulting → dnata
USD 18m in 18 months
Designed the transformation as a consultant, then joined to deliver it myself.
UAE destination-management group
Complaints down 95%
The largest destination-management company in the UAE, across 17 destinations.
Tourism 365 · ADNEC Group
USD 30m revenue opportunity
A nine-month transformation that digitised the product portfolio.
Thirty years in elite and global organisations to know what good looks like. Where I don’t, I infer from first principles.
How we work together
Two ways in.
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Strategy Session
When something has landed that is too big, too unclear, or too consequential to work out alone.
A day on it, with someone who has carried situations at that scale and holds no stake in the answer. You come out knowing what you are actually dealing with, what you are going to do, in what order, and what would have to be true for it to fail. Set down in writing, so your organisation can move without another round of debate.
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Ongoing Advisory
The complex and high-stakes does not arrive on a schedule.
I stay close enough to your business to be useful the moment it does: nothing to explain, no ramp-up, no agenda of my own. That compounds: I know your people, your constraints and what you have already tried, so the counsel gets sharper the longer it runs. You still make the call. You just don’t make it alone.
The foundation
The same discipline, taught: how fighter pilots decide, and how you build the foundation yourself.
One subject, three ways in: a talk, a workshop, or the course. Become Decisive
Talk to me
Thirty minutes, and you’ll know.
Tell me what’s stuck. I’ll tell you straight whether I can help.
Book a 30-minute callWingman: independent judgement, alongside yours.