Latest episodeEP.06Jun 15, 202613:00
The $240 Million Goodbye
Graham Walker gave $240M to employees with no equity when he sold Fibrebond — and attached a five-year string he told everyone about. A gift, or an exchange?
Operator ProfileStrategy · Leadership · Operations · SoftwareRef / SL-OP-2026-05
00Value Statement
The business you built for the last decade isn’t built for the next one.
I run the full reset — strategy, leadership, operations, and the working software — alongside your leadership team, until it is.
- Subject
- Stuart Leo
- Role
- Operator
- Estd
- 2014
Your business is ten years old. You built it. It still works. But you’re starting to wonder what comes next.
The sales engine runs on a spreadsheet someone built in 2015. Operations live in three tools that don’t talk to each other. The website was last updated under your last general manager.
And every conversation — with the bank, with your business partner, around the family table — now has the same line item: AI.
You don’t need an AI strategy.You need a reset.
I’ve sat in that seat.
I’ve run the turnaround, picked the team, cut the chokepoints, and shipped the software myself. I know what it is to hold all four threads at once and still lie awake wondering whether you’re moving fast enough.
That’s the work I do — so you’re not the only one holding it.
One operator. Four threads. End to end.
Big firms won’t go below fifty million. Boutiques specialise too narrowly. Independent operators are usually one-trick. One person holding all four threads — and shipping the software your operating model now needs — is structurally rare.
That’s the work.
A
Strategy
Diagnose the four threads. Decide what stays. Decide what goes. Set the next twelve months in writing.
B
Leadership
Pick the team. Train the team. Replace what won’t move. Hold the tempo of execution.
C
Operations
Find the bottlenecks. Cut the chokepoints. Measure the outputs. Run the operating model.
D
Software
Ship the agents. Build the automations. Replace the spreadsheets. Hands on the keyboard.
Three steps. Then it’s yours.
No SOWs. No change orders. No junior delivery team. One operator, one fixed rate, one number — here’s how it runs.
01
Diagnose
Start a conversation. We scope the four threads and name what stays and what goes. Four to eight weeks, paid — and either side can walk at the end.
02
Embed
One operator, one fixed rate, inside the team. Hands on the keyboard, not advice from the sideline. Thirty-day notice, both ways, always.
03
Hand over
The engagement ends because the work is done, not because the calendar said so. The systems, the team, and the operating model stay.
Receipts, not credentials.
What the work actually delivered. Numbers from real engagements and shipped systems. Names removed — the brands come out in conversation.
R.01
Revenue doubled. EBITDA up 10%+.
Turnaround / Professional services
R.0212 → 46 assets. Paid CAC under 7% — 2× more efficient than OTAs.
M&A growth playbook / Tourism
R.034× organic SEO in 30 days. 6× revenue per month in 90 days.
Go-to-market rebuild / Tourism
R.0412,354 prospects enriched. 3× lead generation.
Customer-acquisition pipeline / Property
R.05Five business units unified. ASX-listed group.
C-suite integration / Property
R.06Asset acquired at 17% premium to market value.
Reset & scale up / Property
Most of the work is internal — agents, automations, transformation programs that aren’t mine to publicise. Eight more sanitised builds on the next page, with the diagnosis, the work, and the why.
Weekly. Fifteen minutes. Zero fluff.
Each week I record Commander in Brief — a fifteen-minute briefing that takes a real leadership decision in the news and connects it to the framework. The newsletter is the written version. Both are free.
Resolute.
In print since December 2024. The frameworks the website uses, the briefings draw on, and Waymaker operationalises — written down in one place.
Without a reset, a decade of advantage quietly becomes a decade of catch-up.
The businesses that get left behind don’t fail loudly. A competitor resets first. The best people drift. And the lead you spent ten years building becomes the lag you spend the next ten defending.
Lead the next decade the way you led the first — except now the business is built for the era it’s in.
The AI moment is here. You already know what help you need.
- Q.01Are you stuck on every thread?
- Q.02Is the AI moment now?
- Q.03Do you want one operator end to end?