Owners usually bring in an outside operator when a business needs to be steadied, integrated, reorganized or prepared for its next leader. Each of those four situations is described below, with what the work does about it and where the experience comes from.
A business that needs steadying.
An underperforming business or unit, a leadership team that is not functioning, or an empty seat at the top. In Veritate provides an interim or fractional operator (a COO, a general manager, or a right hand to the CEO) for the number of days per month the work requires. Jeff did this work for ten years as President of the company: he took over a business whose core market was shrinking and rebuilt it for growth (refer to The record, below). Additionally, at the owner's request, he shared oversight of a sister business for about eighteen months with the president of another sister company, taking responsibility for its service operation and promoting and coaching its next leader from within.
An acquisition to integrate.
Before close, the work is an operator's view of how the target actually runs. After close, it is making one company out of several. Jeff wrote an acquisition thesis for consolidating a shrinking market, completed three acquisitions, and made the four companies one: one set of business systems, one legal entity, and one culture taught to every acquired manager and employee. He then tested each deal against its original valuation model and the price paid.
A program that has stalled.
An initiative that keeps slipping, a plan that nobody believes, or a business case that will not survive the board. The work is to charter it, bound the scope, stand up the governance and the decision log, build a case that holds up, and run it to a decision. After his company was sold, the acquirer retained Jeff to turn a new enterprise-software initiative into a running program. He wrote the charter, stood up the governance, served as product owner, and built the business case as a risk-adjusted return model, with every input estimated as a low, base and high case and correlated inputs linked rather than treated as independent, so that the uncertainty in the return could be measured, not just its midpoint. He also built an AI-assisted operating system for running the program, including audit controls to catch the AI overstating its own progress.
A business that depends on one person.
Much of a company's value can sit with its founder or its CEO. The work is organization design, succession, and the machinery for developing the next level of leaders, so that the value does not leave when one person does. Jeff has done this three times, with the three companies he acquired, and each depended on one person. Two were owned by a single owner who wanted to step out, and one of those was the company's original founder. The third was employee-owned, but its decisions rested with its president. Each was brought into a company built to run without any one person: functional leadership across four sites instead of four general managers, one culture instead of four, and a development program for existing and future leaders. His own six-person senior leadership team stayed on mission through the company's sale, which put their own roles at risk; most of that team remained with the company after the sale.
