Taking over something someone else built

Taking over something someone else built is a strange job. You inherit their decisions, their people, and quite often their reasons for doing things a particular way, which nobody has written down anywhere.

I was the CFO at a venture-backed business when, within weeks of my arrival, there was a change at the top and the board asked me to pick up the interim CEO remit alongside the finance role.

High staff turnover. A culture under real strain. And a model that, when I looked at it honestly, was structurally unprofitable rather than temporarily loss-making, which is a different problem requiring a different answer.

The first thing I did was resist the urge to have a plan by Friday.

I assembled a small team from within the business to take stock, and we spent a few weeks working out how the thing actually functioned, which was not the same as how the org chart said it functioned. I also spoke to everybody in the business: the people who knew where the problems were and had mostly given up expecting anyone to ask.

The business was so focused on delighting its customers (always a good thing) that it was building bespoke solutions, rather than products. Then it priced them like SaaS.

We reorganised around a manageable number of products that could be sold repeatedly instead of rebuilt for every customer.

The culture piece, I handled directly and personally with completely open conversations with each member of the team. Turnover settled within a few weeks.

One senior person had already resigned shortly before the change at the top. A few weeks later they asked to withdraw their resignation, having seen where we were heading. That told me more about whether it was working than any metric I could have built.

Then I took the plan, funded and product-first, to a board spanning sovereign wealth, venture capital and trade investors: not a room that rewards wishful thinking.

The instinct, when you pick up something that someone else built and cared about, is to demonstrate value by changing things quickly (if you’re a Brit, you’ll recognise this each time we get a new Prime Minister). That instinct is usually wrong.

What earns you the right to change things is showing that you understand why they were how they were in the first place.

Do that, and people hand you more, faster, than they ever would have if you had arrived with answers. Skip it, and you spend the next year rebuilding things you were sure were redundant.