These engagements are anonymised at client request. The situations, challenges, and outcomes are real and verifiable under NDA.
Long-term advisory mandate covering a full strategic rebuild: complete technology stack overhaul, new product suite designed for the next decade, and an executive team restructured around where the business needed to go — not where it had come from. The thesis required the board to commit in writing before any of it made sense on paper.
Mandate to turnaround and restructure UK operations for an international logistics group. The business unit was haemorrhaging money and losing market relevance. New products developed. Structural costs addressed. Leadership reconfigured around delivery, not survival.
Board-level advisory supporting strategy to migrate from traditional telecoms into ICT services, with a specific mandate to develop a sustainable B2B revenue base. The thesis required the board to disagree with two decades of its own operating assumptions.
Turnaround strategy designed and executed. New technology stack implemented. Balance sheet restructured. Debt obligations renegotiated. Operational model rebuilt for the margin environment the business actually operates in, not the one it was originally designed for.
Led a full strategic turnaround of the ME/Africa group. Cost base restructured. Revenue streams rationalised. A new executive team built with the depth to take the business forward without the founder dependency that had become the central strategic risk.
A large telecoms group had a three-year plan that had survived every review cycle and lost its conviction somewhere in the process. Brought in to replace the consensus with a defensible thesis. Twelve interviews. Three competing arguments stress-tested in writing. One backed by the board.
Ian Russell is a former CEO of large-scale South African telecoms organisations, a published author on leadership, and an active board and executive advisor across fintech, logistics, manufacturing, and the nonprofit sector.
The advisory practice exists because every client he's worked with has had a version of the same problem: they knew something was wrong, they had good people working on it, and the answer they kept arriving at was the wrong one — for all the right-sounding reasons.
He currently holds multiple Chair and Board roles across sectors including fintech, education, technology, and the nonprofit sector — operating across South Africa and the United Kingdom.
But the way you're looking at it might be. A short conversation decides whether we're the right fit.