I help organisations replace fragmented processes, disconnected tools and inherited complexity with operating models built for performance — from procurement architecture and data governance to business systems design.
What I Fix
I help organisations overcome the operational problems that prevent them from scaling effectively.
These are rarely technology problems.
They are operating model problems.
Transformation Work
Six projects that required more than a process map. Each one demanded a complete rethink of how the organisation operated.
IWG's Design & Construction team manages 1,750+ active fit-out projects across 120+ countries — and every one of them was running on a broken foundation. Kahua, the designated project management tool, was so poor that every project manager built their own Excel tracker instead. The result: complete disconnection. No shared visibility. No single source of truth. Silos at global scale.
Senior leadership had no real-time visibility without someone manually pulling data from multiple sources before every meeting. The task of fixing it had been on the backlog for years — but the scale made it feel insurmountable, and the pressure of live projects meant nobody had stopped to redesign the machine while running it.
I started by mapping the full operating model — not just the tools, but the processes, governance structures, roles, and information flows that connected them. The goal was to understand why the current system had emerged the way it had before designing a replacement. The diagnosis: the organisation had solved individual problems locally, repeatedly, without ever stepping back to look at the whole.
I structured the redesign around seven operational pillars — the 7Ps: People, Product, Process, Platform, Partnerships, Prices, and Performance. This ensured the solution addressed the complete operating model rather than replacing one spreadsheet with another. I then authored a formal RFP to Notion to design and build the system — a document that itself became a diagnostic tool, surfacing gaps the organisation didn't know it had.
A Notion-based operating system for the full lifecycle of a centre — from initial project request through design, specification, procurement, and delivery. Seven integrated modules replacing all existing tools. Phase 1 (Q3 2026) delivers the foundation: people directory, stage gate process, product catalogue, supply chain directory, cost pricebook, and commercial ordering workflow. Phase 2 adds the full performance reporting stack from site to MD level, and evaluates Kahua replacement. Phase 3 extends to external contractor access and enterprise BI integration via IWG's Andromeda data lake.
Engage the data team earlier. The schema and field naming requirements for the enterprise data lake emerged late in the process, creating rework. Starting with the data architecture and working backwards to the operational design would have been cleaner — and would have made the enterprise reporting story more compelling earlier in the business case.
IWG's product catalogue lived across 74+ spreadsheets — different formats, scattered across C drives, SharePoint, shared drives, and local desktops. Nobody owned it. Nobody trusted it. The same product might appear under several different codes depending on which file you happened to find.
For years the situation had been acknowledged and ignored. The task of consolidating it felt so large that no one ever picked it up — until an ex-WeWork colleague showed Lee a small subset of catalogues he'd built in Notion, and something clicked.
Lee took the Notion idea to his manager. Together they bought a licence on a credit card and ran a proof of concept with a single catalogue. It worked. The business gave them the green light to migrate the rest.
Working through all 74 catalogues systematically, Lee designed a master coding structure and data schema — ensuring the catalogue would stay clean at scale, not just be cleaned once. He made every editorial call, resolved every conflict, and built the governance model alongside the data.
But the bigger insight came during the process: Notion could do far more than store catalogues. That realisation — and a conversation with colleague Ash — became the genesis of BuildOS.
CleanList — a single governed product catalogue with validated entries, unique product codes, consistent pricing where available, supplier linkages, and category tagging. The foundation on which BuildOS's product module was built. And the proof of concept that gave the business confidence in Notion at scale.
Involve procurement and design stakeholders earlier in defining the data schema. We finalised the product code structure before fully understanding how downstream systems would need to consume it — which created rework when integration requirements became clear. Data standards should be agreed cross-functionally before the build starts.
A asset tagging pilot was already underway when Lee joined — but with no governance, no scope control, and a leader who was on his way out of the business. The project had a sprawling list of asset types to tag, no clear ownership structure, and the business was heading down a consultant-led route with quotes in the region of £15M.
The first question Lee asked was: does this pilot actually need to be this big to prove what we're trying to prove?
Lee took over the pilot and immediately reduced scope. Instead of tagging every asset type, the pilot would focus on a defined subset — desks, chairs, tables, and storage solutions — across four IWG centres. Small enough to control. Still large enough to prove the concept.
Lee did the tagging work personally, using native mobile devices and a lean technology stack rather than the specialist equipment the consultant route assumed was necessary. Across approximately 12,000 assets, the approach proved viable — and opened a very different conversation about what the full programme should cost.
A structured business case quantifying the cost differential between the consultant-led model and an internal delivery approach. The case specified the technology, training requirements, and resource model needed to run the programme without external dependency — projecting £15M+ in savings against the quoted consultant route. The pilot itself served as the evidence base.
Build the business case first and use the personal tagging as supporting evidence, rather than the other way around. Doing it myself was compelling as a leadership story — but it slightly obscured the strategic point, which was about procurement model design, not personal hustle. The most important insight was about supplier dependency, not effort.
VeUP was a fast-growing AWS consultancy with strategic ambitions but no central coordination function. Initiatives were progressing inconsistently, cross-functional blockers weren't being surfaced, and there was no mechanism to join the dots between teams working in parallel. An internal platform (The Hub) designed to help had failed to gain adoption and was close to being written off.
There was also an AWS Cloud Operations Competency project that had been attempted — and abandoned — by two previous leads. The consensus was that VeUP didn't have the case studies or internal proof needed to get it across the line.
Lee co-founded the Strategy Office with one other person. The model was simple: weekly one-to-ones with every function head, covering their 30/60/90-day plans — building a complete picture of what each team was doing, where their blockers were, and where connections existed between functions that they hadn't spotted themselves.
In practice this meant setting up workshops, connecting teams that needed to talk, getting ahead of dependencies, and stepping in when initiatives stalled. For The Hub, Lee ran a root cause analysis of the adoption failure — redesigned the key workflows with the people who had rejected it, and ran the relaunch as a change management campaign rather than a system deployment. The people who'd been loudest against it became its biggest advocates.
A functioning Strategy Office with governance, reporting cadences, and cross-functional visibility across all initiatives. The AWS Competency was achieved — by connecting the technical team with Customer Success to source the case studies that previous leads had failed to produce. The Hub went from near-abandonment to 90% internal buy-in. MENA expansion launched entities in Abu Dhabi and Riyadh within two months. SOC2 Type-1 delivered independently alongside all of the above.
Establish governance for the governance function itself earlier. I started a Strategy Office without defining the team's own decision rights, resource constraints, and success criteria — which meant the PMO was clearing everyone else's blockers while nobody was managing the PMO's own capacity. Define the function's remit before you start using it.
As VeUP moved upmarket, prospective enterprise clients were asking about compliance posture before the conversation could go further. SOC2 certification was the threshold — without it, certain deals simply couldn't progress. The business had no existing framework, no dedicated compliance resource, and no previous certification to build from.
The task landed with Lee alongside everything else he was already carrying as co-founder of the Strategy Office. There was no playbook. He had to write it.
Lee mapped the full scope of SOC2 Type-1 requirements against VeUP's current posture — identifying gaps across security policies, access controls, risk management, and operational procedures. He then designed and implemented the compliance framework systematically: writing policies, establishing controls, building the evidence collection processes, and preparing the organisation for audit.
Working with Drata as the compliance automation platform, Lee structured the controls so that evidence collection was ongoing and auditable — not a manual scramble before review. Everything was built to be maintainable, not just passable.
A complete SOC2 compliance framework covering all required trust service criteria. Policies, controls, evidence workflows, and audit documentation — all built from scratch and implemented within the compliance window. The framework was also structured to serve as the foundation for ISO 27001, making the next certification step significantly more straightforward.
Engage the technical team in controls design earlier. Some of the access control and logging requirements touched infrastructure in ways that created back-and-forth that could have been avoided with earlier alignment. Compliance work that touches engineering needs engineering in the room from the start.
Camio's founder had a clear vision: a structured inventory and asset management platform that could bring order to the kind of chaos Lee had encountered first-hand during IWG's asset tagging pilot. The challenge wasn't the technology — it was translating operational reality into a product that would actually work in the field.
That required someone who had been in the field. Who understood what happened when inventory management was entirely manual, and what a structured system needed to do differently. Lee had just spent months figuring that out.
Lee's role was strategic advisor — not builder, not architect. From the earliest stages, he ran workshops and design sessions with the founder to shape Camio's core processes: how assets would be tracked, how data would flow, how warehouse and replenishment workflows would be structured.
The asset tagging work Lee had done at IWG became the operational foundation Camio was built on. Lee brought direct, hands-on knowledge of what worked and what didn't — translating field experience into product decisions.
A platform whose core processes were shaped through genuine operational insight rather than theoretical design. And a full-circle moment: Camio is now implemented at IWG, where Lee is using it to improve supply chain visibility and warehouse and replenishment workflows across the global centre delivery programme.
Career
From military service to startups to global enterprise — every move was about finding harder problems to solve.
Philosophy
Before the process maps and the platform decisions — these are the principles that shape how I approach every problem.
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