Speed, on its own, was the defence.

The SR-71 Blackbird had almost no defence, no missiles, minimal armour. Its only trick was acceleration. Over three thousand surface-to-air missiles were fired at it across its operational life. None hit. Everything that didn't make the aircraft faster was left off it, because weight was the enemy of speed.

The competition isn't what's slowing SilverChef down. What slows any business at this scale is the weight it accumulates internally, process added for good reason once and never taken back off.

I'm positioned to take that weight off in a way most hires aren't, because I know your customers from the inside. As a dealer, I feel the friction points SilverChef doesn't always see, not from a deck, from the daily grind of actually being one.

You've already seen a focused example of this through the work with Matt, real value, delivered fast. Between the three of us, we can do a lot more, faster.

• I'll institutionalise the initiatives and proofs of concept Matt has been building, turn "promising" into "in production."
• I'll be the boots on the ground: delivering on what we already know works, and uncovering the next layer of territory.
• I'll keep the footprint small, no drawn-out projects, no six-month discovery, the simplest thing that works shipped first.

I'll roll up my sleeves in the parts of the business facing the most prickly problems, usually the teams most buried in BAU, with little room left to progress the initiatives that would actually change the status quo. I've done this before: bridging gaps between silos, taking someone else's proof of concept, and working with tech and ops to bring it properly into the business.

The SilverChef Brain

This is a suggestion of what's possible, one example of how far the thinking behind these ideas can go. The improvements I'm proposing elsewhere here are deliberately incremental and executable. This one is aspirational and audacious, even if it's a later-phase conversation once the systems migration is done.

The core systems migration creates an opening: a native, proprietary AI trained on SilverChef's own data, strategy, performance and customer history, surfaced back to the people who need it, when they need it.

The Art of Important But Not Urgent

You've set the FY27 goals. The destination is clear.

Execution is the open question. Who owns making sure we move toward those goals day to day, and who makes sure every department is pulling in the same direction? Right now that's nobody's job specifically, it's everybody's job a little, which in practice can mean it's nobody's. With the year already underway, that's the gap worth closing first.

• Work with each department to build out the initiatives that will deliver their part of the FY27 strategy, turning the goals into concrete work each team owns rather than a target they're measured against.
• Run a monthly check on every initiative, close enough to see the ones drifting before they cost us, and make the call to realign early rather than explain it later.
• Own non-BAU delivery, the initiatives that de-risk and promote the FY27 strategy. I'm accountable for their delivery, not necessarily every hour of the work. The model is delivery ownership, working with department heads, not around them.
• Lift and shift what's working across markets: find out why something works, then get that learning to the market that needs it.

I've made a habit of taking on the toughest problems in a business, the ones with no obvious owner and no clear answer yet. I work them hands-on, until they're solved or clear enough to hand to the right business unit to run with. I go this deep because, by definition, these are the problems nobody else has the capacity, bandwidth or context to untangle yet.

Our last conversation had me looking back at some of what I did the first time around: cure rates, COVID arrears management, credit submissions, Project Whitehorse, contract duration and ROI by SKU. Problems people said couldn't be solved. I solved them, not because I'm special, but because I spent more time with each one than anyone else was willing to.

That's been the pattern for me since SilverChef. The difference now is I'm sharper than I was last time I worked there. Getting a shot to bring what I've learned since back to SilverChef isn't something I take lightly.

Examples of work