2018 – 2020 · CloudShift — Delivery Director
Twelve people and £150k a month when I joined. Forty-five people and £700k a month eighteen months later, on the way to a Globant acquisition.
CloudShift in 2018 was a good small Salesforce business — a sharp founding team, real technical depth, a couple of strong enterprise clients. The problem was that it was running close to capacity. Pipeline demand was real, but every new engagement had to be threaded through the same handful of senior delivery leaders, and the moment one of them was on holiday or distracted, something cracked. The business needed to become a practice, not a small team of specialists.
I joined as Delivery Director with a brief that was unusually clear: scale delivery, keep margin, don’t break the culture that had got us here.
The first decision was the org shape. We moved from a flat structure to delivery pods built around sector and capability — Financial Services, Consumer/Retail, Service Cloud, Marketing — each led by a senior who could carry the client relationship and the technical call. That meant promoting people into roles they hadn’t done before, and being honest with the ones who didn’t make the jump.
Hiring came next. We needed to roughly triple the practice inside eighteen months without diluting quality. 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. We brought a third of the hires in at the senior end and built underneath them, rather than trying to grow up from the bottom.
The third move was governance. Once you have five or six delivery pods running in parallel you can’t hold the quality bar through founder energy any more. We put in a delivery operating model with a weekly practice review, a standard risk taxonomy, and a public escalation path. Boring, necessary. It’s what let us land Saint Gobain — a programme that wouldn’t have been deliverable inside the old structure.
When COVID hit in March 2020 the practice held. We didn’t furlough; we kept the pipeline moving through the worst of it; 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 enterprise clients that included Saint Gobain and a deep enough operating model that an acquirer could see how to plug it in. The founders sold to Globant shortly afterwards, on terms that made the original team well.
This is where I learned the trick of leaving a team running rather than dependent on me. The pod structure, the operating cadence, the senior bench — they all had to work without me in the room. They did. That’s the bar I set for every leadership role since.
Talking to me about this kind of brief?
lee@leegoodenough.com