Results That Speak for Themselves
Two stories from 25 years of operational leadership—each one a company in crisis, and what it took to turn it around.
Case Study 1: PE Acquisition Turnaround ↓ · Case Study 2: Enterprise Product Recovery ↓
From Crisis to Core IP
The Situation
Following a private equity acquisition, the Operations Director of the London office of a mobile financial clearinghouse resigned unexpectedly. Kyle was deployed to London on short notice to backfill the role until a permanent replacement could be hired. He had no background in the industry—a clearinghouse performing multilateral financial settlement across 12 currencies, where new staff routinely needed 8–12 months to reach full operational understanding.
The organization he walked into was under serious strain from multiple directions at once.
The Problem
The challenges compounded quickly:
- A deeper management vacuum than expected. In addition to the Ops Director's departure, the CEO and COO had been dismissed by the new PE owners and the Managing Director had also resigned—leaving Kyle as the de facto head of a 43-person international operation with staff drawn from 19 different nationalities.
- A culture that had drifted from the company's growth stage. The London office had been in business for several years in a startup mode that had never matured into a more professional model. Leadership structures, hiring practices, and team dynamics needed to be rebuilt to match the scale and accountability demands of a PE-owned company.
- Single points of failure throughout the operation. The office's entire banking function ran through a single aging computer on an unsupported operating system—which began failing shortly after Kyle arrived. Key institutional knowledge was concentrated in individuals with no backups, creating fragility at the core of a business whose primary function was moving money reliably.
- A catastrophically failed software launch. A new financial settlement application built by the company's offshore subsidiary had been installed in Kyle's first month and proved incapable of performing financial settlement—preventing the movement of millions of dollars to customers who had loans indexed to that revenue. The resulting delays created significant disruption across the industry.
What Kyle Did
Over a six-month deployment, Kyle stabilized the operation systematically:
- Software crisis first. Enlisted the CTO to bring the offshore development team to London in person for several months so issues could be resolved in real time alongside the operations staff. When it became clear the application couldn't be salvaged, made the decision—alongside the new CEO and VP of Operations—to revert to the legacy system and rebuild from scratch.
- Rebuilt the team structure. Filled two vacant regional team lead roles through internal promotion and new hiring. Decentralized hiring authority from a single gatekeeper to the regional managers closest to the work—improving both fit and accountability.
- Eliminated the single points of failure. Created a dedicated Banking Team to own all banking relationships and processes. Promoted an Assistant Operations Director as a backup leadership layer. Worked with IT to resolve the obsolete infrastructure before it caused a settlement failure.
- Wrote requirements for a new financial settlement system. After stabilizing the operation, Kyle authored a full set of requirements for a purpose-built replacement: a database-driven system with full audit trails, automated multilateral settlement, real-time position visibility, and direct banking integration—replacing the manual, spreadsheet-based processes that had been creating the company's operational fragility.
The Results
What started as a stabilization became a growth platform. The operational foundation built during the turnaround enabled 300% customer growth — with no new headcount.
The Legacy
The system Kyle designed became the company's key intellectual property—surviving intact through two subsequent acquisitions and retiring the acquirers' own systems after internal competitions both times. It has been in continuous operation for over two decades and has settled more than $200 billion in transactions. The technology he designed outlasted the company he went there to save.
Why It Still Runs
Systems built under crisis conditions usually produce quick fixes. That this one survived two acquisitions, won internal competitions against the acquirers' own platforms, and has run without interruption since the early 2000s reflects the discipline of doing the work right even when the pressure argued for doing it fast.
From Loss-Maker to Record Deals
The Situation
In 2016, Kyle was assigned to manage a portfolio of enterprise messaging products at a global telecommunications services company—a product area he had not previously worked in. The flagship product in the portfolio was a white-label platform provided to a major European customer, considered a high-profile relationship due to the customer's standing in the industry. The product was underperforming against revenue targets — a gap that looked, from the outside, like a straightforward improvement opportunity.
The Problem
When Kyle analyzed the numbers, what he found was more serious than the original framing had suggested:
- The product wasn't just underperforming — it was losing money. The contract was structured around a monthly minimum well below the target rate, and Kyle's analysis revealed that the actual cost to serve exceeded what the company was earning. Despite dedicating more headcount to this product than any other in the portfolio, the customer was deeply unsatisfied with performance and complained weekly about service issues.
- Digging deeper, the team uncovered why. Kyle empowered his product managers to analyze the data and return with findings. What they discovered was structural: the original contract had been built on the assumption that the platform would generate high volumes of lower-margin consumer messages. In reality, the customer was using it as a low-volume, high-margin business messaging platform—generating tens of millions per year from the service while paying the company a fraction of that. The pricing structure had been designed around the wrong use case from the start.
What Kyle Did
Rather than managing the situation quietly, Kyle surfaced it directly at the executive level and committed to an outcome:
- Public accountability at the leadership table. In his first portfolio review with the CEO and leadership team, Kyle named the product as a loss-maker with no path to profitability and committed publicly: fix it before the contract renewal, or recommend shutting it down. This created a clear mandate and set a clock.
- Empowered the team to diagnose the real problem. Rather than prescribing solutions, Kyle asked his product managers to analyze the data and return with findings. Their analysis confirmed that the pricing model captured only a small fraction of the value being delivered. The problem wasn't execution—it was a structural misalignment between the business model and the customer's actual use case.
- Negotiated from a position of informed strength. With the analysis in hand, Kyle's company opened renewal discussions a full year early with a clear position: the company would commit to higher platform availability to meet the customer's needs, but the pricing had to reflect the value being delivered. If the customer couldn't agree to new terms, the service would be wound down at contract end. The data gave Kyle and his team the confidence to hold that position.
The Results
The Legacy
Three years later, the customer renewed under similar terms—making it the third-largest deal the company had signed in a decade. The original deal remained the largest in five years. Combined with a separate financial clearing deal from Kyle's portfolio, his products accounted for all three of the company's top deals signed over a ten-year span, in a product portfolio designated as in the "declining" phase of the product lifecycle.
Why the Customer Agreed
The customer's satisfaction three years later—renewing under similar terms—is the most telling detail in this story. A 4× price increase mid-contract doesn't produce a happy, renewing customer unless the terms worked for both sides.
Is Your Organization Ready for This Kind of Work?
These results didn't come from advice. They came from someone in the building, taking ownership, building systems, and holding the line. That's what SCI brings to every engagement.