Six Free Executive Playbooks, Built From Repeated Problems

Six free executive playbooks, built from the same structural problems coming up again and again in real conversations. Here’s what’s actually in them, and why they’re free.

There’s a particular kind of conversation I have a lot. Someone senior gets in touch with a version of the same problem: the CDP business case Finance keeps knocking back, a personalisation program that’s stalled because nobody designed the operating model underneath it, a retention strategy that only exists because someone finally asked why acquisition gets all the budget. Different industries, different logos, same structural gap.

After enough of those conversations, I started noticing something. The advice I was giving wasn’t really bespoke. It was a pattern I’d already worked through, usually more than once, and I was reconstructing it from memory each time. That’s a bad use of anyone’s time, mine included. So I wrote it down properly, once, for six of the problems that come up most.

The result is a set of six executive playbooks, and they’re free to download.

What’s actually in them

I didn’t want to write six versions of the same generic advice with the sector name swapped out. Each one is built from a specific, real problem I’ve either lived through directly or advised on closely, with the identifying detail stripped out but the structure left intact:

• The CDP business case that survives contact with Finance, because it leads with the cost of inaction rather than an uplift projection nobody can independently test
• An operating model for personalisation at scale, built inside a regulated insurer, that stops the function collapsing into either a bottlenecked central team or six disconnected ones
• Retention economics, treating the moments after the sale as a designed commercial discipline rather than something that just happens because your product has decent switching costs
• Cold-start growth, for the specific trap of needing proof to get investment and investment to get proof, using two real marketplace launches that solved it from zero
• FSI marketing, on what it actually takes to run a marketing function at the pace the business needs inside a compliance environment that was never built with marketing’s pace in mind
• M&A integration, for the marketing and commercial workstream that most deal frameworks treat as a line item, right up until brand and data decisions turn out to be the thing the whole synergy case depended on

None of these are theoretical. They’re drawn from work inside a large, regulated Australian insurer, an automotive marketplace and OEM ecosystem, and a multi-brand digital marketplace group through two rounds of M&A. The company names and financial figures are gone. The structural pattern, the sequencing, the failure modes, the actual mechanics of how each problem got solved, are all still there.

Why I’m giving them away

Partly because I think they’re genuinely useful on their own, no strings attached, and I’d rather you read something worth your time than another gated PDF that’s three pages of padding around a single idea you could’ve guessed.

And partly, if I’m being straight with you, because the best way for you to know whether I’m the right person to help with a problem like this is to see how I think about one before you’ve spent a dollar finding out. A pitch deck can tell you I’ve done this before. A framework you can actually pressure-test against your own situation tells you a lot more.

They’re built as standalone references, not teasers for a sales call. Read the one that matches your problem, use what’s useful, and if it turns out there’s more to work through than a downloadable PDF can carry, you’ll know exactly where to find me.