The Portfolio Executives

I have operated and led teams at all stages of post-sales, and before it, from both sides of handover through Design and Architecture, Professional Services and Delivery, Customer Success and Customer Support. What I saw along the way was that having four or five teams all responsible for different parts of the customer journey is difficult without a clear vision. These teams have different managers in different departments, and you can’t rely on them working organically together. When problems occur, it gets messy. Founders and managers are pulled away from their own work, or were never able to separate themselves from it in the first place. I knew there were better ways, and that the answer isn’t the same for every company. I also knew I didn’t have all the answers, but they’re there if you ask the right questions.

My tech career has taken me through many different areas: Technical Writer, Developer, Pre-Sales, Consulting, Implementation, Solution Architect, Support and Customer Success. Later, I built and managed teams across regions, always focusing on customer outcomes. At the end of my last permanent role, I took some time to reset and think about what value I could add that few other people could. My unique, hands-on experience of the entire customer journey for B2B enterprise SaaS customers led me to an understanding of how SaaS companies can successfully grow and retain customers. I realised I could bring that experience to growing SaaS companies that don’t yet have a clear vision for what makes customers successful post-sale.

My first transformational success came inside the organisation I was working for at the time. I designed the ISMS and led the practice through its first ISO 27001 audit in 2015, then hired a dedicated CISO and handed the programme over to them to own. That was the first time I saw a couple of patterns clearly: even a process built for IT security and compliance needs all teams working towards a single goal to succeed. And transformative success means building the system, proving it works, handing it to the right person and then moving on to the next problem. A true solution has to survive and run independently of its creator. It’s the same pattern I’ve used in every role, even before I recognised it.

Along the way, that idea has become one of my biggest lessons: a true solution has to survive and run independently of its creator. A lot of founders are inside this problem. They have a great product or solution but don’t know how to make it live without them. This often becomes clear when they don’t have a good answer when I ask what “good” looks like in post-sale. They can tell you their revenue target; they can’t always tell you what a well-run handover, implementation or Customer Success motion should feel like for the customer. When that single vision is missing, every team, from Sales and Delivery to Customer Success and Support, starts optimising for its own patch rather than the customer’s outcome. The founder ends up as the connective tissue, holding it all together by hand. Naming that gap, and showing founders that it’s fixable without them personally owning it forever, is a large part of the job.

It’s working for me now because I’ve sat on every side of this problem: Pre-Sales, Delivery, Customer Success, Support and the vendor side of enterprise procurement at Resolver. I recognise the pattern quickly and know which lever to pull first. It’s also a good moment for the market. A lot of founders in early growth are landing their first enterprise customers or hitting board-set retention targets, and the post-sales architecture they built for ten customers doesn’t scale without them. That’s exactly the point where a fractional operator, brought in for a defined engagement rather than as a permanent hire, makes the most sense.

Looking ahead, I hope more customers start getting advice early and design their post-sales systems as thoroughly as their sales engine, before things start to break. Personally, I’d like Scale Refinery to become something bigger than me: a practice that’s hireable and scalable in its own right. I wouldn’t be true to my own philosophy if I didn’t believe it could outlive me. Through the Portfolio Executives community, I’m also hoping to meet other fractional operators who complement what I do, across product, finance, operations and technical delivery, so referrals can flow both ways, while continuing to sharpen my offer alongside people who have been building portfolio careers longer than I have.