Lee Goodenough. Fifteen years building and recovering regulated programmes.

After five years as Managing Director at VASS, I went independent in 2025 to do three things at once: hands-on commercial operations advisory, programme recovery for at-risk Salesforce implementations, and shipping crm.care — a paying-customer application I built and operate on the Salesforce platform.

The thread across all of it is the same one I pulled on as MD: how does a commercial system actually generate predictable revenue? Pipeline cadence, forecast confidence, data integrity, the renewals motion. Things that get hand-waved at strategy off-sites and never built.

I'm a heavy daily user of Claude and Codex. crm.care is mostly something I wrote with them. I think being hands-on with the AI toolchain is the table-stakes signal a 40-year-old operator gives in 2026 — it's how I stay credible about what shipping software involves rather than relying on a five-year-old mental model.

When I took the seat in February 2020, VASS UK was a £5m business with about 40 staff, a fragile delivery record, and a Salesforce alliance at risk. Two months later we were in lockdown. The Group had backed an ambitious UK growth plan with new PE money; the brief was to make the UK reliable enough that growth was worth the bet.

The first eighteen months were the boring machinery the business had never had. Pipeline cadence on a weekly drumbeat. A forecast the Group CFO could rely on. Delivery governance that flagged at-risk programmes six weeks early. We re-earned Salesforce Crest, then Summit tier. By year three, the business was profitable on a sustainable margin and was the country the Group pointed at.

I added the global Digital Customer Experience line of business in 2024 — a €100m+ practice across Salesforce, Adobe and Magnolia, with regional leadership across EMEA and LATAM. Same operating-model thinking, applied at a different scale.

By the time I left in March 2025, the UK was £22m, 200+ staff, the third largest country contribution to Group, and the alliance Salesforce execs were asked to meet. Delivery overruns were down 40% from where they started. What I'm proudest of isn't the headline number — it's that when I left, the team didn't fall apart.

CloudShift in 2018 was a good small Salesforce business — sharp founding team, real technical depth, a couple of strong enterprise clients. The problem was capacity. Every new engagement threaded through the same handful of senior delivery leaders, and the moment one of them was distracted, something cracked. The business needed to become a practice, not a small team of specialists.

We moved from a flat structure to delivery pods built around sector and capability — Financial Services, Consumer/Retail, Service Cloud, Marketing. We changed the hiring loop to over-weight judgement and customer instinct rather than only Salesforce platform depth, because the platform skill is teachable and the customer skill mostly isn't.

When COVID hit in March 2020 the practice held. We didn't furlough; we kept the pipeline moving; we shipped customer programmes from kitchen tables. Two months later we were having the conversations that led to the Globant acquisition. By the time I moved to VASS, the practice was forty-five people, £700k a month, with an operating model an acquirer could see how to plug in.

My first true product-owner seat. Spirent was acquiring aggressively and the commercial systems were the chokepoint — multiple Salesforce instances, inconsistent forecasting, no single view of the global sales pipeline. The brief was to consolidate the lot.

Over five years I led the £5m end-to-end Salesforce transformation: new forecasting models, sales automation, integration of more than ten acquired business units into a single $500m global sales organisation. Worked across Sales, Finance, Operations and IT to translate commercial requirements into scalable solutions and to land them with the regions.

Spirent was where I learned that the technology decisions are downstream of the operating-model decisions, not the other way around. A finance team that doesn't trust the forecast will route around the system; a sales team that doesn't trust the data won't put deals in it. Build for adoption first, build for elegance second.

Started in parallel to Spirent — an evening-and-weekend practice that grew into something with real customers. The pattern was the same one I'd later run at CloudShift and VASS: organisations with expensive Salesforce implementations that weren't delivering ROI, usually because the operating model around the platform was broken.

Built reporting, change and risk frameworks for platform delivery leaders. Shipped and managed an application on the Salesforce platform and the AppExchange. The application — and the brand — became crm.care in 2025, this time as a fully independent product with paying customers.