Why This Diagnostic
My career as evidence base
I started in digital strategy in 1998, when eCommerce was a hypothesis and measurement was an afterthought.
Over the next decade I worked across media, technology, and consumer goods — running campaigns, managing client portfolios at WPP & Publicis, Kantar and Microsoft, learning what moved commercial outcomes and what just produced activity.
By the time I was managing €250M in advertising across fifteen brand portfolios simultaneously, the same question kept surfacing: how do we know this is working?
That question pulled me toward data and analytics. I spent fifteen years building and running measurement practices — first at agency scale, then as a consulting director, eventually leading a 60-person analytics and AI practice at Capgemini and frog, managing a £6M revenue line.
I worked with P&G on adViewability before the industry had a standard. I ran cloud partnerships and enterprise data strategies. The consistent finding, across every industry and client, was the same: organisations weren't short of data. They were measuring the wrong layer.
An Energy-provider’s customer service volume dropped 85% when we traced the root cause upstream to a systemic data flow issue nobody had identified. TV spend fell 20% across fifteen FMCG portfolios when we shifted the measurement lens from individual campaigns to portfolio-level attribution.
The answers were usually there; the questions were pointed at the wrong place.
Why Aieutics exists
Aieutics came from that recurring observation. After two decades and thirty-four clients across FMCG, technology, automotive, energy, retail, healthcare, luxury, and media, the pattern was consistent enough to build a practice around: people invest enormous effort at the wrong layer, and the structural sequence matters more than the effort itself.
The same structural mistakes appear in different industries wearing different costumes. The startup that can't convert pilots to contracts has the same dependency failure as the corporate innovation team whose proof-of-concept succeeds technically but dies in procurement.
The gap I saw wasn't for another strategy consultant. It was for someone whose first instinct is to diagnose the sequence rather than prescribe a solution. Critical Path Layers is the system for naming these patterns.
I've been early to structural shifts before the industry caught up: eCommerce strategy at Kingfisher in 1998, neuromarketing research at Mediamento in 2008, the adViewability standard with Alenty and AppNexus. Each was a moment where the conventional framing was wrong and the evidence pointed somewhere uncomfortable. The "see further" claim in my tagline isn't aspiration — it's a pattern from two decades of recognising structural shifts before they become consensus.
The practice now
I continue to work at the intersection of corporate innovation and startup acceleration with HEC Center for Incubation & Acceleration — one of the top five innovation ecosystems in Europe (Financial Times). Programme-embedded coaching across L'Oreal's Beauty Tech Atelier, TotalEnergies ON, and Bank of America: working with founders inside accelerator structures where the coaching is diagnostic, not motivational.
I've managed P&Ls, led teams of 20 to 60 people, and run fifteen brand portfolios simultaneously. I ran the things I now diagnose. When I tell a founder that their organisational structure will break at their next growth stage, or tell a corporate team that their pilot governance won't survive contact with procurement, this comes from having been inside those structures and watching the failure modes from the operator's seat.
I have gone through fast growth, one IPO and three acquisition, but also multiple successful exits as an investor.
