Case Studies
What the work actually looks like.
Three engagements. Three different types of problems. The same standard applied to each: understand it clearly, design it rigorously, and stay until it is done.
M&A Integration
Integrating a Nine-Figure AI Acquisition
at a LegalTech SaaS Company
The situation
A high-profile deal. An under-resourced integration.
A growth-stage LegalTech SaaS company had completed a nine-figure acquisition of an AI research firm, its largest deal by a significant margin. The strategic logic was strong: the target's proprietary AI capabilities were a direct accelerant to the acquirer's product roadmap. The problem was the integration. An integration leader had been embedded in the deal process during due diligence and was in place at close, but the governance infrastructure needed to run the integration at scale still had to be built. The internal team was already stretched across a second, smaller acquisition that had closed months earlier. Workstream ownership was unclear. The acquired team, nearly 100 people across two continents, had received no coherent communication about what integration would mean for them.
The mandate
Own the integration. Make both sides trust the process.
The role was Global Head of M&A Integration and Transformation, reporting to the Chief Strategy Officer and working directly with the Chief Product Officer, Chief Technology Officer, Chief HR Officer, and Chief Financial Officer. The mandate was clear: establish integration governance, align the workstreams, protect the talent that made the acquisition valuable, and deliver a functioning integrated organization by Day 180. The unstated mandate was equally important: give the acquired team a reason to stay. Post-close attrition was a real risk. Many of the most valuable employees had options and were watching how this was being handled.
The work
Structure first. Trust second. Integration third.
The first two weeks following deal close were not about integration plans. They were about listening. Structured interviews across both organizations surfaced the real concerns: redundancies, reporting ambiguity, culture clash between a scrappy research team and a commercial-scale company, and a product roadmap that had been designed without input from the team now expected to build it.
From there, a governance structure was designed and stood up: a cross-functional integration management office, eight workstreams with named owners and defined charters, a weekly integration council with CPO, CFO, CSO, and CHRO participation, and a communication cadence that gave the acquired team visible, consistent access to leadership.
The second acquisition, which had been drifting, was brought into the same governance model. Two integrations, one framework, one integration leader.
The turning point
The moment the acquired team stopped looking for the exit.
Roughly six weeks after close, the engineering and research leads from the acquired company were invited into the product roadmap planning process, not as consultants but as participants with real authority over scope and sequencing. That shift, from "we are integrating you" to "we are building something together," changed the dynamic. Voluntary attrition over the first 180 days was substantially below what comparable integrations typically see.
The larger lesson: integration risk is usually a people and trust problem before it is a process problem. Getting the governance right matters, but it matters because it gives people a reason to believe the organization is being managed with intent, not just managed.
"Integrations don't fail at closing. They fail in the ninety days after."
Transformation and Strategic Execution
Redesigning a 51-Year-Old Franchise Network
to Enable a PE Exit
The situation
A 51-year-old organization running a business model from a different time. And a PE sponsor that needed it sold.
The company was one of the oldest executive search franchise organizations in the United States. At its peak, it had nearly 3,000 franchisees. By the time this work began, it was down to roughly 300. The decline had been decades in the making: a prior leadership decision that let franchisees drop the company's brand made it easy for them to walk away at contract end with their businesses intact. A parent company bleeding cash had gutted the support infrastructure that franchisees were paying for. And the market had moved: launching a boutique executive search firm had become much easier in the age of the internet.
When the parent company was taken private by a PE acquirer, the new sponsor could sell most of its staffing businesses quickly. The franchise organization was the exception. The model was unusual, the trajectory was declining, and most buyers could not make sense of it. The business needed to be fundamentally redesigned before it could be sold.
The mandate
Figure out how to make an unsellable business sellable.
The role was VP Head of Strategy, recruited to support the company president. The president left in week 13. That changed the job considerably. Within weeks, the parent company had been acquired by a PE firm, and the operating context shifted again. The explicit goal became clear: redesign the business model so the PE sponsor could exit. There was no playbook for this. No one had ever taken a serious look at whether the franchise structure could be redesigned, whether the all-or-nothing model had alternatives, or whether a 51-year-old organization had a different future than the one it was currently executing.
The work
Two structural changes. One new story for buyers.
The first initiative was a tiered affiliation model. The firm had always operated as an all-or-nothing proposition: one franchise fee structure, one royalty rate, one full suite of services. The new approach replaced that with four tiers, each with different fees, royalty rates, and service packages. Franchisees whose contracts were up for renewal could stay in the network at a lower tier. Independent boutique firms could affiliate at a level that matched what they actually needed.
The second initiative was a Business Services Unit that unbundled the company's service offerings from the franchise contract entirely. Field consultant visits, individual training courses, and advisory services were made available on an a la carte basis. Together, these two moves repositioned the firm from a traditional franchise organization with one pricing model into a professional services network with multiple ways to participate, at multiple price points, for multiple types of buyers.
The result
A different story. Because it was a different business.
The business that existed after roughly two and a half years of this work was not the same business the PE sponsor had inherited. The model had changed. The go-to-market had changed. The narrative had changed. And the narrative change mattered because it was grounded in something real: a tiered affiliation structure that did not exist before, a services business that generated revenue outside the franchise contract, and a path to growth that did not depend on convincing reluctant boutique firms to sign a decade-long commitment.
The company was sold to a private buyer. The PE sponsor got paid. A 51-year-old organization that had been functionally unsellable when this work started had found a buyer willing to bet on what it had become.
"The right strategic question is never 'what should we do.' It's always 'what are we willing to stop doing.'"
Transformation and Strategic Execution
Reversing a Multi-Year Customer Retention Decline
in an Insurance Business
The situation
Years of strong top-line growth hiding a slow-motion retention crisis.
A professional liability insurance program within a $150M healthcare division had been growing revenues steadily for nearly a decade. The division itself sat inside a $500M US business unit of a global multi-billion dollar financial services company. By every measure leadership was watching, the business looked healthy. As long as the top-line moved upward, the assumption was that things were on track.
They were not. Underneath the revenue growth, customer retention had been declining for six or seven years. Retention rates had fallen from roughly 84% to the 80–81% range, a slide that would have been visible to anyone running the numbers on renewals. But no one was. New business growth had been strong enough to mask the problem, and the leaders responsible for the results had been reading the story the top-line told them. By the time a slowdown in new business growth forced a closer look at the underlying numbers, the retention decline was already years deep.
The mandate
Dig in. Find what’s actually driving the decline. Build a plan to reverse it.
The request came from the EVP overseeing the healthcare division: examine what was driving the retention decline, surface the root causes, and build a plan to turn the trend around. The work was done from inside the organization, not as an outside consulting engagement, but from an SVP-level strategy and corporate development role within the parent business unit. That distinction mattered. Full access to people, systems, and data made it possible to reach things no outside firm would have gotten close to.
The work
A Lean-style diagnostic that went all the way to the ground floor.
Most strategic diagnostics concentrate at the top: executive interviews, financial benchmarking, competitive analysis. This one was designed to go further. A Lean-style review of the business broke down the entire sales and servicing operation by sales channel, customer type, nature of the transaction, and whether the business was new or a renewal. Customer journey maps were built across every major touchpoint: buying a policy, renewing a policy, reaching customer support by phone, online, or live chat, and seeking help with a question. The goal was to understand every place the customer experience could break down, because that is almost always where retention problems live.
The process required conversations with dozens of stakeholders, from the most senior executives in the division down to frontline individual contributors. Surveys were fielded to team members who touched the work every day. Opportunities for improvement were tagged and synthesized into themes that could be prioritized and acted on. The philosophy behind the approach was deliberate: the most important insights are usually not in the boardroom. They are with the people who operate the systems, answer the phones, and see what actually happens when a customer tries to do something. Senior leaders set strategy. The people on the ground know what is breaking.
That philosophy produced the engagement’s most consequential finding. A technology-focused leader mentioned, almost in passing, that roughly half the time a customer tried to log in to renew their policy online, the system timed out or failed. Customers who could not log in would call customer support, often during a 30-minute lunch break, the only window many of them had. The business had predictable renewal seasonality, which meant the call center was absorbing a surge of frustrated, time-constrained customers exactly when volume was already at its peak. The queues backed up. Wait times exceeded the lunch break. Customers hung up and purchased their next policy from a competitor. The fix was approximately $100,000 in IT investment. That leader had been raising the issue internally for two years and had never been able to get the budget approved.
The result
Retention stabilized. The full opportunity waited on a different decision.
The diagnostic produced a set of structured workstreams targeting the operational, marketing, and technology gaps driving customers away. The recommendations that were implemented delivered real results: call center operational costs fell by more than $1 million as volume spikes became manageable and dependence on outsourced overflow capacity dropped sharply. Retention stabilized and began trending upward, with a credible path toward the 89–90% range within a year or two of sustained implementation.
Not all of the recommendations were implemented. Several of the highest-impact changes, including the technology investments that would have addressed the root causes most directly, ran into organizational resistance from a leader skeptical of technology-driven approaches. The $100,000 IT fix, among others, did not get funded.
Every recommendation was documented: not only to make the case, but to ensure the record existed for whenever the organization was ready to act on it. The diagnostic surfaced everything that was wrong. The plan addressed it systematically. What the work could not do was make the investment decision for the leadership team. Organizational willingness to invest is almost always the final barrier in a turnaround. This engagement removed every other one.
"The hard problems don't need more strategy. They need someone willing to do the work."
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