Why I Started Writing This
Great technology doesn't automatically become a great business. Powering that transformation is the work.
Early in a finance leadership engagement, I had to tell the CEO that the cash burn didn’t match the growth story we were telling investors.
The technology was real. The customers were real. The revenue was real. None of that was the problem.
The problem was that nobody had built the business yet.
There was no cost discipline. No visibility into where money was actually going. No model that connected the next fundraising round to a coherent path to profitability. The company had been operating as if great technology would, on its own schedule, produce a great business.
It doesn’t. It never has.
That conversation, the uncomfortable one, with the math on the table and the room very quiet, led to a resource reallocation that transformed the company’s financial trajectory. Bottom-line performance improved dramatically while revenue continued to grow. Not because we did anything magical. Because we built the business the technology deserved.
The gap nobody talks about
I’ve spent 25 years in and around technology companies. Industrial engineer at Motorola and Intel early on. Then finance — at Vistaprint Europe, Genesys, Veritas under Carlyle, NDS as interim CFO, and a string of transformation seats since. CFO. VP of Business Operations. Independent advisor. Fractional CFO.
Every one of those roles had a different title, a different industry context, and a different P&L. They all had the same problem underneath.
The gap between what the technology promised and what the business actually delivered.
Sometimes the gap was structural — the company had outgrown its financial infrastructure, and the systems were three generations behind the strategy. Sometimes it was a business model that hadn’t been re-architected after a fundamental product shift. Sometimes it was a culture that confused activity with progress. Almost always it was a leadership team that had never made the move from running the technology to running the business of the technology.
That gap is the most expensive thing in tech, and almost nobody writes about it.
Why now
The market has changed. Inefficient growth is no longer tolerated. Boards and investors expect profitability, or a credible path to it, far earlier in a company’s lifecycle than they did even five years ago. The era of raising and burning without an operating thesis is over.
What’s emerging in its place is a discipline. It doesn’t have a clean name yet, but I’ll give it one: operational efficiency as innovation. The companies winning right now aren’t the ones with the most novel technology or the largest war chests. They’re the ones treating financial and operational infrastructure as a competitive advantage and operational efficiency as a creative act, not a cost-cutting exercise.
This is what I want to write about.
What Power-ing Great Business is
Power-ing Great Business is a weekly post about the work of turning great technology into great business. It draws from 25 years of operating inside companies that were trying, successfully and unsuccessfully, to make that turn.
Some posts will be about finance. Some will be about operations, business model conversion, M&A integration, post-IPO infrastructure, or the messy first 90 days of a transformation. Some will be about people, because every system investment, every process redesign, every capital allocation decision lives or dies on whether people actually adopt the change. That part doesn’t show up in most spreadsheets. It’s the most underestimated lever in business.
All of it will be written from the operator’s seat. Real numbers when I can share them, real tradeoffs when I can’t, and a strong point of view either way.
What this isn’t
It isn’t a tactical playbook for any one role. The audience I’m writing for: CEOs, CFOs, founders, board members, investors, already knows the tactics. What they need are frameworks for thinking and the willingness to hear an opinion.
It isn’t a memoir. I’ll use stories from my career when they sharpen a point, but the point is always the point.
It isn’t a corporate publication. This is more operational and less editorial. Expect specifics. Expect contrarian takes. Expect the occasional uncomfortable conversation, in writing.
Three beliefs I won’t budge on
To set the table for what’s coming, here are the convictions you should expect me to keep returning to:
1. Profitability is not a lagging indicator. It’s a strategic choice. It’s made or avoided by leaders, every quarter, in how they allocate capital and talent. Companies that treat profitability as something that will eventually happen are usually wrong about both the eventually and the happen.
2. People adoption is the ROI most leaders never model. Every system investment and every process redesign has a financial case attached. Almost none of those cases price in whether the humans involved will actually change their behavior. That’s where the ROI either materializes or it doesn’t.
3. Operational efficiency is innovation. Most companies treat efficiency as the boring cousin of growth. It’s the opposite. The most creative work in business right now is happening in the operating model, and the companies that figure that out are going to compound while their competitors burn.
Who this is for
If you run a technology company, sit on its board, invest in growing companies, or are responsible for one of its functional engines, finance, operations, product, go-to-market, this is for you. If you’ve ever had the experience of watching a brilliant product fail to become a real business, you already know the gap I’m talking about.
If you’ve watched it happen and felt like you couldn’t quite name why, that’s exactly what I’m going to try to do here.
What’s next
Next week: Profitability Is Not a Lagging Indicator. The first conviction, fully unpacked, with the specific operating moves that turn it from a slogan into a strategy.
Subscribe so it lands in your inbox. Forward this to one person who needs to read it. And if any of this provoked something: agreement, disagreement, a story of your own, please reply. I read everything.
Talk soon.
— Shannon