I'm Daniel Latham
I work with growing businesses that want to tighten up how they operate, build stronger teams, and plan for the future with some clarity.
How I got here
I have spent 14 years in operations, from senior management through to director and board level, inside a business that grew steadily throughout. That is where this comes from: not from studying how companies ought to be run, but from being the one answerable when the way the business ran stopped working.
Growth tends to outpace structure, and the gap between the two is where the damage happens. Margin goes missing, good people burn out covering for a process that no longer fits, and the business keeps moving because a handful of individuals are holding it together. I have been one of those individuals, and I have had to build the structure that meant nobody needed to be.
Now I do the same thing for other people's businesses, which usually means simplifying something that has quietly become overcomplicated and making sure the processes serve the people rather than the other way round. I am also a qualified ISO auditor, although I am considerably more interested in whether the business runs smoothly for you and your team on a Tuesday morning than in whether it can satisfy a checklist.
How I work
Alongside your team rather than around them. The people doing the work usually know where the problems are, so most of what I find comes from working with them rather than from a spreadsheet. I will still make my own call on what to do about it, and I would far rather tell you something unwelcome in week one than write you a comfortable report in week six.
Everything I build gets handed over working, with the people who use it already trained, because a process that depends on me is just a different kind of key-person risk. If a piece of work is not going to pay for itself, I will say so before you spend the money on it. You will hear what I actually think, early, whether or not it is what you were hoping to hear.
What I try not to do is flatten what makes a smaller business good. Agility and the willingness to change something on a Wednesday because it was not working on Tuesday are advantages you have over larger competitors, and plenty of well-meaning structure has killed both.
Let's have a conversation
Half an hour, no charge, and no expectation of anything after it.