Experience Is The Value Multiplier
To accelerate value creation from ideas to outcomes, you need the partners with scar tissue by your side.
Author: David Johnson (Current Future Chief Strategy Officer Specialist)
The old playbook has worn thin. Consultants come in and advise you to “grow revenue and cut costs”. They hand over a 100-page deck and 100-day plan for management to deliver.
Somehow this model was sustained for decades, particularly in markets where operational inefficiency was common and the consulting analysis was enough to enable financial engineering to cover an underlying malaise. That window is largely closed. PE firms, asset owners and business leaders at the pointy end of value creation are increasingly clear that advice disconnected from execution isn’t a value creation strategy. It’s overhead.
What truly accelerates transformation is experience and judgement. Operating partners who have been inside complex organisations during change, who have sequenced programmes that landed, who carry a personal library of what works, what fails, and most importantly, why and in what order.
Operator Defined
An Operator is an experienced executive with deep functional expertise, traditionally deployed inside a private equity portfolio company by the General Partner and increasingly in founder-led mid-market businesses, to execute a transformation outcome directly. They work within the leadership team to build the capability for transformation and deliver the value creation plan, before moving on.
The difference between an operator who has done something before and one doing it for the first time is pattern recognition. Knowing which changes will hit structural resistance before they're announced. Which sequence of moves builds momentum rather than running into roadblocks. Which quick wins are real and which are mirages that cost eighteen months to recover from.
This knowledge doesn’t live in a framework. It lives in scar tissue.
Who on your team has been through a transformation like yours before, with the experience of having owned the outcome and the consequences, to know what questions to ask and what traps to avoid?
There is a direct parallel with AI deployment.
The operators extracting the most from AI tools are the ones asking the most precise questions and interrogating outputs with the same rigour they would apply to any serious analytical work. The rest are just running more prompts and using more tokens. Experience and judgement are just as essential here as in any transformation programme. Possibly more so.
I think about this whenever someone cites Gartner's 2019 forecast that AI would eliminate 80% of project work. They didn't get the outcome wrong. They got the mechanism wrong. The tasks haven’t been eliminated: project plans still get built, customer insights still get gathered, requirements still need to be elucidated before code gets committed. None of that work has disappeared. But the time it used to take has dramatically reduced. And that compression is also where the risk sits: speed without discipline produces slop at scale. A colleague's retirement guidance innovation programme learned this the hard way - months into an AI-accelerated build before discovering material gaps because they skipped crucial research on key user cohorts. The reset wasn’t a polish. It was a ground-up redesign of the value proposition. The AI didn’t fail. The design process did.
What separates operators navigating this well is adherence to a discipline that AI makes tempting to abandon: staying with the problem long enough to find the real cause; keeping humans and their behavioural complexity at the centre of the design, and applying regulatory and commercial lenses before the build is under way. As AI shifts from responding to queries toward agents chaining tasks, the cost of skipping the groundwork compounds with every step taken. The faster the agent, the more expensive the wrong question at the start.
The experience premium is being elevated.
The market is no longer paying for breadth of credentials or seniority of title. It is pricing for experienced operators who can design and deliver richer value creation programmes. Not financial engineering overlaid on a business and handed back. Not consulting decks built by people who won’t be there for the execution. Delivered outcomes that land fast, because the operators have done it before. Achieved at pace, because experienced judgement is paired with the right tools. Rigorously questioned along the way, because knowing when to challenge the output is as important as generating it.
When shaping up the team to drive growth and transformation, it’s worth pausing to contemplate the nature of expertise that can deliver tangible outcomes, and the cost of getting that wrong. True transformation and value creation requires diligence and experience. When did you last pressure-test your value creation plans with someone with the scar tissue from building and selling a business like yours?
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