From a pay cut to a $1.6bn exit

Hello!

As part of our career support ecosystem here at OUB, we regularly run guest speaker sessions – often with former consultants who've made interesting moves into industry or simply built great careers. Today I want to share one that has really stuck with me.

Dominic left Bain & Company for a smaller title and a pay cut – a sales analyst role at NetJets, a business in real difficulty after the 2008 crisis. At the time, a move plenty of his peers would have been sceptical about.

It ended with him as COO of Depop, leading a 400+ person team through global scaling and a $1.6bn exit to Etsy. Today he chairs and advises consumer businesses.

In our session, Dominic talked openly about what it actually takes to move from strategy into execution – from advising businesses to running them. Below are his seven pieces of advice for anyone looking to go from strategy to ownership:

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1/ Be open to sideways or downward moves. The NetJets title was smaller and the salary lower, but there was real urgency to get things done as the business was in trouble. "That's where you can make real impact," as Dominic put it. Within a year, his reputation had shifted from "the ex-consultant" to "someone who gets things done". That credibility became the foundation for the rest of his career.

2/ Prove by doing, not thinking. In consulting, your value lies in finding the answer; in a business, it lies in making it happen. "You move from 90% thinking and 10% doing to the complete reverse." His formative lesson: a new pricing model he built at NetJets couldn't be implemented because the system couldn't handle decimal points. "The strategy was sound, but it was useless unless we could actually make it work."

3/ Empathy beats being smart. "In consulting, you're paid to be smart. Inside a company, that approach backfires fast." To deliver impact, you first need to build trust with the people who are meant to help you deliver it. And trust gets built by being helpful and humble. The stakes only rise as you get more senior – you go from managing consultants who'll work until 1am without question to managing people with completely different motivations.

4/ Accept "good enough". Consultants are trained to deliver perfect outputs – apply that to everything in a commercial role and you become the bottleneck. The best operators develop an instinct for what truly matters, put their energy there, and accept that not everything needs to be world-class. The story that stuck with Dominic: a fellow ex-consultant turned CEO spent days evaluating insurance options, built a spreadsheet, and presented it to the board. They told her: "We have bigger problems."

5/ Seek sponsors, not just mentors. Mentors give advice; sponsors open doors. In every business Dominic worked in, one or two senior people backed him – they understood his strengths and were willing to hand him real opportunities. At ASOS, that meant being given ASOS Marketplace, a small, underperforming division. "That became my first real P&L. It taught me how to run a team, make decisions, and deliver results."

6/ Learn to let go. "If you push decisions down the organisation, you'll move faster. You just have to accept that people will make mistakes. But if you try to control everything, you'll halve your impact."

7/ Know yourself before chasing titles. He's honest about the reality of P&L leadership: "80% of your time is firefighting. The big strategic moments are maybe 20%. It's rewarding but relentless." On his first day taking over facilities as COO, the ceiling collapsed – "five minutes later I was buying mops." His advice: get clear about what actually energises you. If it's solving new problems, you might genuinely be happier in strategy – and there's nothing wrong with that.

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My own #1 takeaway from the conversation was just how different consulting is from "industry P&L". Outside of consulting, your success depends a lot less on how smart you are and a lot more on how much you can actually get done as well as on the relationships you build.

The good news: none of that is beyond any of us who have survived consulting. The people who thrive when moving into operations and P&L leadership aren't smarter – they've just worked out how the rules have changed, and started playing by the new ones.

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All the best,
Rich & the OUB team