Newsletter

Most CEOs and business owners will, at some point, entertain the idea of selling. It may be the long-term plan, or just an option. 

But you don’t need to be planning an exit to ask a valuable question: would your business meet the scrutiny of a buyer? 

From an IT and operational point of view, the things that make a business valuable and ready to sell are simply the things that make it a good business.  

Efficient processes, strong cyber security, tech that supports growth, well-organised data, and demonstrable compliance. A business that is simple, robust, and not overly dependent on individuals. These things can add significant value to your business but, critically, they also make a business simple, profitable, and reliable anyway.  

These issues can’t simply be fixed when a buyer appears. You can prepare the documents for due diligence relatively quickly, but improving poor-quality data, replacing a core system, or reducing key-person dependency takes considerably longer. In our experience, 18 to 24 months.  

We wouldn’t suggest running a permanent exit programme, but addressing these same issues provides a basis for a better business and ensures you’re in good shape when the time comes to sell. Fixing problems in advance is considerably less costly than having a buyer reduce their valuation because of them. Being ready means the future remains yours, whatever you choose to do.

If you’d like to discuss preparing your business for exit, and improving it at the same time, contact us for a no-pressure conversation. We’d be happy to help. 

P.S.  In the meantime, you’re invited to our upcoming webinar AI masterclass for boards: beyond the headlines. Our expert panel will discuss what really works when it comes to AI implementations in mid-sized businesses – and when you may not even need it. 

We’ve been talking a lot about how targeted AI implementations can solve problems for mid-sized businesses – more specifically, freeing up time for staff to focus on higher-value tasks. We haven’t yet discussed how CEOs might use AI to make their own jobs easier.    

The reality is that helping leaders be more effective can be a transformation in itself. Reducing admin burden, improving decision-making, and creating more time to think can have an outsized impact.  

A few suggestions for how a business leader might start: 

1. Finding and summarising information 
   Leaders are often thinly spread in scores of different conversations and initiatives. AI can help us quickly find and distil conversations, emails and reports so we spend less time hunting or trying to remember.  
2. Acting as a strategic sounding board 
   AI can help leaders challenge assumptions, test ideas, better articulate plans and predict others’ reactions and objections. Whenever I try this, I always find insights into how others might think. 
3. Improving decision-making 
   By analysing large volumes of data, customer feedback, and operational information, AI can reveal patterns and insights to support better business decisions. AI can make us Excel experts to rapidly go from hunch to facts.  
4. Preparing communications 
   AI can reduce the time CEOs spend creating and tailoring communications. Good communication takes time and needs the personal touch, but AI can help arrive there faster! 
5. Managing schedules more effectively 
   AI can scan forthcoming meetings, pull together documents and other content in advance, and help you prioritise and feel less overwhelmed. 

Again, none of these ideas will change the world. But they provide time and energy and genuinely increase my bandwidth and effectiveness.  

We’ll be discussing leadership and AI in depth in our upcoming AI masterclass: beyond the headlines. It will be online 20 November at 12:30. Register for what promises to be an informative hour on AI in mid-sized businesses like yours.  

Or of course contact us for a no-pressure conversation about AI, or anything IT-related in your mid-sized business.

The conversation around AI has become increasingly complicated. Despite talk of a ‘jobs apocalypse’, the Economist recently reported that many roles considered under threat have actually seen above average pay rises! The truth is that skilled workers armed with AI are getting more done and becoming more valuable.  

We remain focused on what AI can actually do for mid-sized businesses. 

Just a few examples of recent implementations we’ve helped with: 

• Automating manual work for a consultancy firm so employees spend less time on repetitive administrative tasks and more time on activities that create value for clients and the business.  
• Improving decisions from data for a law firm by helping leaders extract insights more quickly, identify trends earlier, and make better-informed business decisions.  
• Speeding up service for a wholesale and distribution business by streamlining processes and helping customers and employees find answers faster.  

I suppose ‘AI helps mid-sized businesses become more productive’ isn’t an eye-grabbing headline. Nevertheless, the real-world AI stories are not about hypothetical futures. They are about organisations finding practical ways to become more productive, more responsive, and more competitive. 

If you’ve got questions about AI in your mid-sized business, I invite you to contact us for a no-pressure, no-strings conversation in the strictest confidence.  

In the meantime, we’ll be discussing another kind of risk in our upcoming CEO masterclass: what’s your real cyber risk? Our cyber security experts will be discussing how to assess your security and steps you can take straightaway.  

CEO masterclass: What’s your real cyber risk? 
Friday, 9 October 2026 
12:30pm to 1:30pm  
Zoom webinar Reserve your place

Our clients typically think of cyber security as risk reduction. This makes sense when three major UK airports were recently attacked, and leading tech bros signed a letter calling for the world to beef up cyber defences. Unfortunately, mid-sized businesses are an increasing target for ransomware, with incidents typically costing six figures and leaving permanent brand damage. 

But there is a more positive way to look at cyber security, in that it can be a point of difference and even support growth. In fact, we’ve been helping our clients use cyber as a means to land contracts in enterprise business supply chains and enjoy the stability and revenue that comes with them. 

Recently, we’ve helped: 

• A digital agency secure work with a Big Four accountancy firm 
• A business communications provider meet the requirements of a major telecoms company 
• A boutique consultancy strengthen its position with a global pharmaceutical organisation 

In each case, demonstrating robust, independently verified cyber security was a prerequisite to earning and retaining business, and the good news is that achieving this doesn’t have to be complex or disruptive.  

The JLR and M&S hacks have made cyber security a strategic issue for their entire supply chains and have even changed the culture throughout both industries.  This change is ongoing and (rightly) becoming normalised for the whole of UK plc. The takeaway is that cyber security is necessary for reducing risk but can also be a path to growth for companies looking to demonstrate their trustworthiness. 

We’ll be discussing cyber risk more specifically in our upcoming CEO masterclass: what’s your real cyber risk?  You’re welcome to send us any questions you may have beforehand for our expert panel. 

Either way, we’re always up for a conversation about the risk – and potential advantages – for your business, with no pressure and in the strictest confidence.

The Harvard Business Review’s recent article, ‘Boards are falling short on cyber security,’ presented the results of interviews with 75 directors and executives. The article is of direct interest to mid-sized business leaders, but it’s paywalled. So to make things easier, I’ve summarised it below. 

The main point is that despite business leaders’ increased focus on cyber security, their businesses have merely seen ‘marginal’ improvements. The authors cite three reasons: 

1. Lack of cyber security expertise 
2. Board-level conversations around AI ignore cyber security 
3. Boards are mistaking regulatory compliance for security. 

HBR go into detail about each reason, but the fix is the same: instead of worrying about the technical details themselves, directors should ‘identify, evaluate, and recruit strong cyber security leadership.’ 

Although this is a US source, it confirms what we’ve seen so many times in the UK mid-market: that most breaches result from lack of leadership rather than technology.  

Our CIOs, CTOs, and CISOs are proven, Board-level IT leaders who understand cyber security, AI, and compliance. We’re also fractional, which means the expertise comes for less than the expense of a full-time hire. And since we make no third-party arrangements, you can trust that our recommendations are in the interest of your security. 

What’s the next step? We’ll be running a webinar on cyber risk on the 9th of October, so watch your inbox for the invite. 

In the meantime, you might book a 90-minute cyber risk session for CEOs and CFOs. It’s a quick way to see a snapshot of your security profile. Or you can simply contact us for a more casual, no-pressure conversation. Either way, it’s in the strictest confidence.  

There are straightforward ways to keep your business safe; let’s talk about how we can help. 

I had an interesting conversation with a Vistage Chair recently (Vistage is an excellent forum for business leaders). Many of the CEOs he knows excel as product or service experts, or negotiators, or perhaps they have the contacts and the network. But technology and information may just not be on their radar. They’re focused on running and growing the business, not becoming technology experts. 

Until something breaks. Maybe it’s a stalled transformation project, or systems that can no longer support growth, or teams frustrated by inefficient processes. Either way, technology suddenly moves to the top of the agenda. 

The question, though, is why wait until something breaks? Technology is no longer a back-office function that leaders don’t need to care about. It touches every part of a business: how efficiently work gets done, how customers are served, how accurately leaders can see reporting, and how quickly the business can adapt to changing conditions.  

Many entrepreneurial CEOs are not focused on technology, and that makes sense. The question, really, is what does it take for them to decide to empower someone else to focus on tech, an expert leader for this area, before it breaks?  

Not every business needs a full-time CIO, but every business does need someone who understands how technology supports their needs – aligning the tech to business goals, identifying and mitigating risks, and ensuring a scalable, commercially viable platform for growth. Technology is a strategic asset rather than something that gets attention when it goes pear-shaped. 

If any of this sounds familiar, have a look around our fractional roles pages, to see how other mid-sized businesses find technology leadership without the expense or commitment of a full-time executive. In the meantime, we’re always ready for a no-pressure conversation about tech leadership and your business. 

How does a CEO enable innovation? More specifically, how do you create the conditions for innovation in a mid-sized business? 

We tackled this topic in our recent CEO masterclass: growth and innovation in practice. In addition to our own IT leaders, we were delighted to have the expert investor, Aaron Baker from BGF, on the panel.  

BGF provides growth funding for ambitious businesses across the UK and Ireland, so Aaron has wide experience in the connection between innovation and growth. He’s learned to sort innovation into what he refers to as ‘three buckets’: 

• Information: It is critical to have the right information to make informed decisions. That might be internal information like profitability or cycle times, but leaders also need to personally stay in touch with our customers and our market and to understand a changing world. 
• Decision-making: Aaron counsels an approach based on moderation. A business needs checks and balances, and decision-making should be ‘quick but not reckless.’  For example, innovation spending can be split into tranches, each matched to specific outcomes. When broken down like this, stakeholders can make decisions quickly but not recklessly. 
• Culture: As is often the case in our panel discussions, the conversation returns to culture. A CEO needs to foster a culture of curiosity, collaboration, and experimentation. Which means that if CEOs really want innovation, they need to be willing to listen to ideas, and to forgive failure.  

As ever, we invite you to contact us for a no-pressure conversation about fostering innovation and growth in your own business. Even in the quietest days of August, we’re always up for a chat.

We’ve been talking about integration issues and manual work this month, which for some clients will indeed mean sweeping changes to their systems and processes. But not always! Quite often there are tweaks which can have an outsized positive effect on a mid-sized business. 

We asked our CIOs and CTOs for examples of quick fixes that had a big impact. 

• ‘Some of the biggest wins I’ve experienced have come from simply mapping and streamlining business processes before looking at technology.’ 
• ‘A construction client was dealing with an avalanche of paper. Whenever they needed material in the field (which was every day), orders were scribbled down and then sent to the back office to reconcile. We trained an AI to ‘read’ the forms. The staff who once spent hours deciphering some foreman’s handwritten scrawl were liberated to do higher-value tasks.’ 
• ‘I worked with a family-owned food business whose card payment systems were expensive and unreliable. The quick fix was to migrate from legacy card machines to better devices, saving them around 20k yearly and a lot of aggravation.’ 
• ‘An engineering company wanted better metadata around files and work output as a key enabler for AI. The users were trying to categorize their work output. But it wasn’t happening – everything was getting classified as ‘other.’ So we looked at the user interface, cut the number of options in the drop-down menu from 22 to 6, and data quality improved dramatically.’  

What strikes us about these stories is that none of them started with a blank slate or a big budget. They started with someone looking at the friction and considering what could be done about it. 

That’s often the real value a fractional CIO or CTO brings: not just the vision for where a business needs to go, but the leadership to bring people together, the judgment to spot the small opportunities, and the focus to make unglamourous fixes happen. 

Let us know if you’d like to talk through where those opportunities might be hiding in your business. Ps. Our next CEO Masterclass: Growth and Innovation in Practice, takes place this Friday, 17 July. If you can’t join us live, don’t worry – everyone who registers will receive the recording afterwards.

Integration issues and manual work are strongly related topics that keep cropping up among mid-market businesses. This recent story will resonate regardless of the sector you’re in. (The client prefers to remain anonymous, but they didn’t mind me sharing the broad outlines.) 

The CEO of a business poised for growth was finding it impossible to move forward because different directors disagreed on the facts. Different departments presented their own reports, and the data was telling inconsistent stories.  

Too much time was spent arguing – which caused distrust, reinforced departmental boundaries, and created manual reconciliation work. The Board was finding it impossible to make informed decisions or even to know what to believe. 

Our fractional CIO, however, quickly grasped the issue – each manager trusted his or her own systems and spreadsheets. There was no single source of truth for everyone to draw upon. Everyone insisted their reports were correct, and the mistakes were in everyone else’s reports!  

A model had to be created – with support from the leaders – to shared information and cross-company processes. Systems and data could no longer reflect departmental boundaries, and every manager had to draw upon common data for any reporting.  

This took a bit of time, of course, and required changes in the processes, technology, and the company culture. But the end result is reporting the Board can trust, reports that empower managers to make decisions within defined boundaries, and increased cross-company cooperation. It also freed up the Excel-wranglers to spend their time on things that matter to customers! 

And the business is able to move forwards with AI initiatives with a clear eye on ROI. No more throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks. The entire business is more prepared for innovation and growth.  

If any of this sounds familiar, I invite you to connect with us for a no-pressure chat. And speaking of innovation and growth, our CEO masterclass: growth and innovation in practice is scheduled for 17 July at 12:30 UK time.  

Watch your inbox for the invite; we’d love to see you there.

Best regards, 
 

Graeme 

I’m writing this just after our Summer Conference in the Midlands, when the team and our partner businesses convened for two days of learning, knowledge-sharing, and perhaps even a little fun. 

The conferences can be a whirlwind. There are so many people to catch up with and so many interesting talks and panels. This time once again our ‘unconferences’ were popular, when our IT leaders pick their own topics for a roundtable chat. 

Since we’ve been talking about growth and innovation this month, I asked a few of our IT leaders for their take on what it is and how it works. The answers were both fascinating and wide-ranging.

Make the impossible into the possible 

One of our CIOs from Wiltshire said that he’s ‘stopped asking how to do something different. Instead, I think about innovation as how we make the impossible into the possible.’ 

For instance, he’s been working with a business that wanted to improve its B2B prospecting – a notoriously time-consuming effort – without increasing the workload. So he’s been using AI to create hyper-personalised messaging for prospects.  

He said, ‘It’s not about using AI to replace the salespeople, but to ensure they have a carefully crafted message for a prospect so we’re not wasting anybody’s time.’ 

Turn useless ideas into something useful 

And one of our CIOs from Yorkshire also had an interesting take. He said innovation is the process of ‘taking ideas that are novel and useless and making them novel and useful.’ 

He had a client who was working to capture more carbon from power plants. The client had a eureka moment as he was changing his youngest’s nappy. He thought, ‘Why not a nappy for a chimney?’  

Of course, this is an oversimplification, but it ended up working, and their chief investor actually acquired the business. From Pampers to PE, as it were. 

Borrow from other sectors 

Our Regional Director from the East Midlands talked about looking at innovation as what one sector might learn from another. 

‘Look at manufacturing,’ he said. ‘Quite often a client will be using Excel for everything, and many businesses are still even paper-based. But then we’ve got retail businesses with nothing but data. It’s common sense to the online retail business, but to the manufacturer it’s quite innovative.’ 

My own takeaway from these conversations is that innovation is not about imposing something different for its own sake. It’s about looking at a business issue and then finding clever ways to solve it. 

One last thought: in this age when everything happens online, it’s energising to see our colleagues in the flesh, to exchange ideas, and simply to share a meal and a chat. Isolation is the enemy of innovation.  

Whilst we are indeed technology experts, Freeman Clarke is about our people and our team, and I’m grateful for the imagination, dedication, and innovative ideas our people bring to their work and to our clients. 

If you’re interested in learning more about the above, contact us for a no-pressure chat. 

Best regards, 

Graeme