Scaling VASS UK from £5m to £22m

The situation

When I joined VASS UK in February 2020 we had a £5m revenue business with around 40 staff, a fragile delivery track record, and a Salesforce alliance relationship that was at risk. We had real talent on the team but no predictable commercial machine: pipeline was sporadic, forecasting was a guessing game, and margin was leaking out through projects that ran long. Two months later the country was in lockdown.

The Group leadership had backed an ambitious UK growth plan with new PE money. The question wasn’t whether the UK should grow — it was whether the UK could be made reliable enough to grow. That was the brief.

What I actually did

The first eighteen months were about putting in the boring machinery that the business had never had. Pipeline cadence on a weekly drumbeat. A forecast that the Group CFO could rely on. A delivery governance model that called out at-risk projects six weeks before they crashed, not six weeks after. We rebuilt the Salesforce relationship from the alliance up — including the executive sponsorship Salesforce expected from a serious partner — and re-earned Crest, then Summit tier.

We hired carefully. Most of the senior bench I inherited stayed; a handful changed. I made one or two mistakes hiring too quickly in the middle, and one expensive one hiring too slowly at the top. I’d do the senior hires harder and faster a second time.

Once the machine was running, we picked our sectors deliberately: regulated financial services, FMCG, consumer-facing healthcare. Capital One, Santander, Rentokil, Reckitt — clients where the work was genuinely hard, where governance mattered, and where the references compounded.

By the third year the business was profitable on a sustainable margin and had moved from “the UK problem” inside Group to “the UK arm we point at.” In 2024 I added the global Digital Customer Experience line of business — a €100m+ practice across Salesforce, Adobe and Magnolia across EMEA and LATAM — to the seat, and ran both.

The result

By the time I left in March 2025 the UK & Ireland business was £22m revenue, 200+ staff, the group’s third largest country contribution, and the Salesforce alliance that the Group put forward when meeting Salesforce executives. Delivery overruns were down 40% from where they started. The forecast was the forecast.

The thing I’m proudest of isn’t the headline number. It’s that when I left, the team didn’t fall apart. That’s the test of whether a P&L leader actually built something or just rode the cycle.

What I’d do differently

Move faster on the senior hires. Move slower on the mid-level ones. Trust the data sooner — by year three the forecast was good enough that I should have been making bigger commercial bets earlier on the back of it, and I was still over-indexing on caution.