Three companies.
Three transformations.
Each of these engagements started in ambiguity. Each one ended with a different organization than the one I walked into.
I joined Nexthink at a moment of real transition, with responsibility for Professional Services across the Americas. That covered services revenue growth, recurring services, implementation performance, partner delivery, organizational design, and customer outcomes.
The post-sale organization was still finding its shape. Engagement Management was largely new, the customer base was growing quickly, and expectations were rising faster than the delivery model could absorb. Net retention sat at 86 percent, which meant the business was re-earning ground every year instead of compounding it.
Rebuilt Engagement Management from the ground up.
Defined the role, hired a brand-new team of senior delivery leaders, and mentored them into owning executive relationships rather than project plans.
Redesigned the post-sale operating model.
Reset how implementation, engagement management, and partner delivery worked together so capacity scaled with customer complexity instead of with headcount alone.
Stood up a partner onboarding program.
Gave partners a repeatable path to certified delivery so we could add capacity without adding cost one-for-one.
Made recurring services a growth lever.
Designed subscription and expert offerings that compounded ARR rather than producing one-off project revenue.
Rebuilt the subscription services offering around customer outcomes.
Sat down with customers, listened carefully, and re-scoped the portfolio around the results they were actually trying to reach.
The work was less about running delivery and more about creating structure, alignment, and momentum in an organization that was evolving quickly.
2x
86% → 98%
$5–10M
Retention moved because the delivery model changed, not because of a pricing adjustment. Customers were reaching value earlier, partners were carrying real delivery load, and the recurring portfolio gave the account teams something durable to renew against.
SmartRecruiters had a strong enterprise pipeline and a growing book of complex customers. The internal narrative was that complexity was a feature, something to be sold and celebrated.
The delivery data, and the customers themselves, were telling a different story. Highly bespoke enterprise deals were slower to implement, harder to support, and less repeatable, and the cost of that showed up after the deal closed rather than during the pitch.
Built the case from a real engagement.
Took one of the company's largest customers and reconstructed an honest account of what had actually made the engagement successful and what had gotten in the way.
Made the argument company-wide.
Presented to sales, product, and the executive team that simplicity and operational scalability matter more than the sophistication of the pitch.
Changed how deals were scoped.
Worked with sales leadership to translate the finding into scoping guidance, so complexity entered a deal deliberately rather than by default.
Fed the pattern back into product.
Turned recurring implementation friction into prioritization input, so the roadmap absorbed problems that delivery had been solving one customer at a time.
Simplicity and operational scalability often matter more than selling complexity for the sake of complexity.
A company-wide narrative shift
Enterprise complexity stopped being celebrated by default and started being weighed against what it would cost to deliver.
Three functions realigned
Sales, product, and delivery worked from one shared view of what made an enterprise engagement succeed.
Scoping guidance that outlasted the engagement
Deal teams carried the standard forward, so the change held after the presentation ended.
This engagement was measured in alignment rather than in a single number. The lasting change was that enterprise complexity became a deliberate choice with a known delivery cost, instead of an unexamined selling point.
Acro's commercial services division was running large parts of its business on paper-based processes. The work was mission-critical, the customers were demanding, and the operating model was straining under its own weight.
Divisional operating costs were running at $20M against a plan that gave the transformation five years. The risk was not only cost. Every manual handoff was a place where customer commitments could quietly slip, and the operators doing the work had been through enough change programs to be skeptical of another one.
Designed the digital operating platform.
Replaced the legacy paper-based processes with a single platform covering the division's core commercial workflows.
Built an offshore support organization from scratch.
Hiring, onboarding, training, and operating cadence, staffed to carry the work rather than just monitor it.
Sequenced the program for speed without breaking trust.
Rolled out in stages that kept the operators doing the day-to-day work ahead of the change rather than behind it.
Handed off a division that could run itself.
Left behind documented process, a trained team, and the operating rhythm needed to keep scaling after the program ended.
We took a division operating on paper and phone calls and brought it into the modern era, in half the time we were asked to do it in.
$20M → $8M
2.5 yr
$12M
The cost reduction came from removing manual work rather than from cutting service levels. Finishing in half the planned time meant the division captured those savings roughly two and a half years earlier than the business had budgeted for.
Working on something similar?
If any of this looks like the problem in front of you, I'd be glad to compare notes.