Case studies

Every person here was already very good at the job they had. The coaching was about the next job, the one that asks you to let go of what made you great, build the systems and presence to lead at a larger scale, and do it while the pressure is on. The results were not soft.

Across sales, marketing, and general management, the same throughline holds: a high performer becomes a leader who gets handed more, bigger roles, teams that outperform, and businesses that move.

Sales leadership

beating NA and worldwide targets

The company is a subscription and revenue-monetization software platform. When Aaron and I started working together in late 2024 it was publicly traded; partway through our work it was taken private in a multi-billion-dollar deal, the private-equity backdrop his biggest career decisions played out against.

The problem

Aaron was the company’s super rep, the individual seller leadership pulled into every hard deal. By the time we started working together he had been moved out of first-line sales management and into a customer-expansion role. He had a top closer’s instincts and real ambition to lead. The catch was that the very things that made him great on his own, jumping into any deal, doing it himself, holding impossibly high standards, were exactly what would cap him as a leader. Under pressure his tone and cadence changed, and afterward he was brutally hard on himself, losing days to self-recrimination. He needed to turn a super rep into a leader, and he needed a place to build those skills before the stakes were high.

The goal

Use the customer-expansion mandate as the training ground: build the skills of a leader who multiplies himself instead of cloning himself into every deal. A team that owns its own pipeline. “We” instead of “I” in front of executives. Urgency channeled as an asset rather than a stress response. And the systematic, repeatable process a company needs to see before it trusts someone with more.

The impact

The skills we built in the expansion role became critical the moment he took over an important team mid-quarter. Aaron installed a prep, rep, debrief coaching model and got genuinely comfortable letting his reps run their own deals. One veteran told him, “I would have used you as a crutch; I’m better now because you didn’t let me.” Within a single additional quarter he made that team the top-performing team in the company. He standardized the enrollment, services, and renewal processes his peers went on to adopt, and his enrollment framework was pulled up and presented across the entire revenue organization. He ran the only in-person QBR of any manager and was the only frontline manager invited into annual company planning. That success led to his elevation to Head of North American Sales, where his teams beat their North America and worldwide targets three quarters running, he qualified for President’s Club five of six years, and delivered the strongest quarters of attainment over goal on his watch, with a credible line to CRO.

Marketing leadership

Ashley’s path runs from a commerce-protection software company, to a pre-IPO identity-verification fintech valued at more than a billion dollars, with a first-time VP role at an earlier-stage startup in between.

The problem

Ashley stepped into her first CMO role at a pre-IPO fintech and walked straight into a hard mandate. Key marketing staff had just left, the team was wary after its previous leadership, and no strategic framework existed to build on. Her founder-CEO's direction came as a stream of ideas, product decisions were bottlenecked, and the executive team spent offsites arguing about process instead of setting next year's goals. Attribution was too thin to show what marketing was producing. With three product marketing roles open, she covered the gaps through brute force, working until midnight most nights and through her own time off. She was excellent at the work. The way she was doing it would not last.

The goal

Grow from an excellent functional marketer into a true C-suite operator, someone who could carry expanded responsibility without carrying it alone, manage up to a demanding founder-CEO, rebuild trust across a fractured executive team, and make decisions with data and boundaries instead of adrenaline and overwork.

The impact

Ashley took ownership of the combined product, product marketing, and solutions organization and rebuilt it around a single narrative and clear success metrics. She used market research to settle a standoff between the CEO’s top-down plan and the field’s bottom-up read, and got a founder who had never trusted data to start advocating for it. Her team posted the highest engagement scores in the company. She owned the product innovation moment that had failed the year before, built the go-to-market plan behind a 35% growth target toward roughly $100M in new sales, and set the boundaries that let her lead at that altitude sustainably. In three moves she went from Director of Product Marketing, to VP of Marketing, to CMO of a $100M-plus run-rate company, with the scope, and the standing, to match the title.

General management

The company is a European mobility super-app spanning ride-hailing, delivery, and micromobility, one of the largest players in its region. Kimberly took over its UK and Ireland market, a business doing hundreds of millions in annual GMV, in early 2025.

The problem

Kimberly inherited a market in decline. On the company’s internal ranking, the market had fallen from number one to fifth or sixth, and the team had gone fifteen months without a direct manager. The obstacles ran deeper than performance. They had not launched a new marketplace category in four years, and there was no go-to-market plan in place when she arrived. The flagship launch initiative was not even signed off until she started. Then came a mid-year shock: a regulatory ruling on how the business was structured struck directly at how a business of that size operated.

The goal

Kimberly set an explicit turnaround mission: by year-end, cement the company’s market leadership by delivering the best value proposition for riders and drivers, forge a sustainable regulatory path through the ruling, hit its GMV run-rate target, and put the market on course to become the company’s largest.

The impact

Starting with nothing, she built the entire go-to-market strategy from scratch in three months and launched the flagship initiative, two years in the planning, as the first smooth launch that market had ever had. Adoption did not just clear the bar, it shattered it: against a target of 15% driver adoption in month one, she reached 75% in two weeks. After four years without a new marketplace category, her team stood one up in two weeks, and she secured fresh investment cases for the market. Facing the regulatory ruling, she refused to react under pressure. She led a structured commercial analysis across five cities, mapping exposure and license runway into a calm response framework rather than a scramble. And she built the team to carry it, restructuring operations for economies of scale, splitting her strongest leaders across the flagship launch and the marketplace business, and shifting herself from hands-on execution into a coaching role with the explicit aim of developing people who could run a country within twelve months. By the autumn, even with later licensing delays and GMV running slightly behind target, the trajectory had fundamentally reversed under her leadership, and the company was exploring acquisition opportunities for the year ahead.

Your next move

Whether it is one leader or the whole team, the work starts the same way: a conversation about what is stuck and what you are building toward.