Some calls you can't take to anyone.
Not the board. Not the team. They're yours, and they're the ones that keep you up at night.
I see what your team can't, on the decisions you're stuck on, and I help you make them. That difference was worth $15.6M at one company, and a 95% drop in complaints at another.
You know the pattern.
Strategy keeps getting updated. The business doesn't move.
Big calls keep getting pushed to the next session.
The team aligns in the room. Nothing happens after it.
Decisions get made. Nobody quite owns them.
The smart people are already in the room. What's missing is decisions that get made and stick.
I've made these calls myself.
These are my own operations. I was the one accountable, and here's how I saw them.
When I was COO at Meeting Point International, the business was getting complaints every day. Guests kept arriving at hotel rooms that were never booked. The team had been fixing it one complaint at a time for years.
Here's what nobody had said out loud. The booking process could only ever produce random failures. No effort inside it was going to change that. It was built to leak.
So we stopped trying to fix it. We built one separate check instead. Every morning, one team went through every booking for the next day before any guest arrived. The complaints dropped by 95%.
The check sounds obvious once you hear it. The hard part was seeing that the old process was never going to work, and being willing to stop pouring effort into it.
When I ran airside operations at dnata, we kept getting blamed for slow bag delivery, and everyone argued about the targets. What I saw was that we were measuring against numbers somebody had made up. There was no honest standard for how fast a bag could actually move. So we built one, a way to work out the real delivery time for each aircraft based on how that plane was loaded. For the first time we could manage against something true. The airline we served went from sending 15 complaint emails a day to asking our advice on their own loading decisions.
At Tourism 365, the same way of seeing opened a $30M revenue pipeline.
Across these roles I ran operations of up to 10,000 people and $250M budgets.
Beyond running these myself, I've advised other companies on the big structural calls about how they should run, across sales, technology and org design. And I teach decision-making at Hult International Business School.
How it works.
A year-long advisory relationship with you and your leadership team. 4 times a year we take half a day on whatever matters most: a decision to make, a problem to solve, a priority to set.
Your team knows the business. I bring the outside view, the hard questions, and the discipline to turn talk into decisions people own.
The work itself.
Each session works through 5 questions:
- What is going on?
- What does it mean?
- What can we do?
- What should we do?
- How do we get it done?
What changes.
The calls that have been pending for months get made in weeks. Meetings end with a decision, an owner and a date. The team stops re-deciding the same things.
Not ready for a year? Start with one session.
Bring a real decision your team is stuck on. In 90 minutes we work it through together, using the same method I use in advisory. The team leaves with the decision clearer, a next step, and a way of deciding they can use again. Most advisory relationships start here.
The Decision Workshop. 90 minutes. Your leadership team, in the room.
Talk to me about itThree ways to work together.
CEO Advisory.
For the founder carrying the hard calls privately, before the team is ready to join the room.
- 4 private advisory sessions a year, 3 hours each
- Direct access between sessions for the calls that come up
- A written brief after each session
Leadership Team Advisory.
A working session in the room with your full leadership team, 4 times a year. The main shape.
- Half a day with the leadership team, 4 sessions a year
- A pre-session briefing call to surface what's live
- A written brief after each session with decisions, owners and timelines
- A between-session check-in, on request
Team Advisory Plus.
Quarterly team sessions plus one-to-one advisory for each senior leader. The same work at the individual level.
- Everything in Leadership Team Advisory
- Up to 16 one-to-one advisory sessions a year with senior leaders
- A quarterly review of each leader's priorities, decisions and friction alongside team progress
Paul Littlejohn.
28 years operating under pressure. 16 in a cockpit. 12 at the executive level.
16 years as a fighter pilot in the Royal Air Force. You learn to make hard calls fast, with bad information, when getting it wrong costs you. You learn to see what good really looks like, because the bar is high and it never drops.
Then 12 years running operations at the executive level. Divisional Vice President at dnata (Emirates Group). Chief Operating Officer at Meeting Point International, across 17 countries. Executive Director at Tourism 365 (ADNEC Group). Faculty at Hult International Business School.
That's what I bring to your team. A different way of looking at the problem, and the proof it pays.
The person you want in your corner.
30 minutes, no fee. Tell me what's stuck, and I'll tell you whether I can help.
Book the call