Sustaining high performance in an uncertain environment was a core theme discussed during Criticaleye’s 2025 Growth Company Forum, which was held in Partnership with Hitachi Solutions, along with the need for leaders to transform and reinvent their businesses to stay ahead of competitors and drive growth.
 

Motie Bring has witnessed firsthand the rapidly changing market conditions during his tenure as CEO of digital payment solutions firm PPRO. He joined the business in 2023 at a point when growth was slowing and demand for profitability was rising amongst the grouping of private investors. Internally, there was confusion around the strategic direction following a large acquisition and a round of redundancies to remove some cost.
 

“Motivation was very limited. The commercial teams didn't really know what they're trying to sell. There was a detachment from the leadership with the business, and there was quite a lot of angst as to the direction the business is going to take,” Motie explained.

 

A decision was then made to reduce the size of the executive team in order to accelerate decision making. “Having a smaller leadership team means that we can move faster. That was the first thing that we did. There was a lot of process simplification. So how can we make decisions faster, move forward faster and become a much more data-led business? So we've tried to use data as the base of how we make decisions. We're not there yet, but it's definitely the journey we're on.”
 

Criticaleye Board Mentor Serena Lang described a similar situation at London-listed industrial fastenings company Trifast, which she currently Chairs, where leadership changes were required to improve performance and reassure shareholders.
 

“There was a situation where shareholders had lost faith in the business, which had had a few profit warnings that weren't foreseen and therefore had lost confidence in the team. The Board changed out the CFO and then the CEO. However, the shareholders were also insistent that the Chair was swapped out, which is when I came in, and the Board appointed a new leadership team.
 

“What the team have been doing is to create what they call the ‘1TR’. So, the whole organisation has got a really clear strategy where it's going, the clarity of markets, clarity of geographies.”
 

Clearly, investors remain hyper focused on leadership capability. Another example was described by Safetykleen Group CEO Erwin Wieffering, who was appointed to the role in 2021 by private equity (PE) investor Apax Partners specifically to accelerate growth and further scale a business that had become fragmented, following a number of acquisitions over several years.
 

“If you want to grow at scale, you need to create the right strategic framework and purpose, and define the underlying business processes and the required capabilities that support our choices [around] where we want to win and how we want to win,” he said.
 

What followed was several new commercially minded appointments to the executive team to support Erwin ahead of a key transformation programme. “Safetykleen is a PE-owned parts cleaning service company. Obviously, growth needed to come at the same time while implementing the new growth strategy. So that's why I started first with the right capabilities in the centre, which turned out to be a very good decision, because they became vital when we started the whole transformation from a digital standpoint,” he added.

The role of the Board in supporting leadership teams through change programmes amid choppy waters cannot be discounted either. “The Board's role is very much around the long-term value and growth of the business and its sustainability,” said Serena. “But at the same time, you don't have a business tomorrow if you've not looked after it today, so it’s managing that tension in the right way. I think the Board has a really strong role to play in that.”
 

Building on this, Mui Hoon Poh, NED at Yoma Strategic Holdings and also a Board Mentor with Criticaleye, said: “Growth companies are really tempted to sprint after expansion, chasing revenue while resilience will probably come second. So [then] you get cash burn, fatigue and [it] maybe weakens the system. As a Board member, we insist on a dual lens approach, which means that you protect the liquidity and execution today, but you need to deliberately build tomorrow's foundations.”
 

It remains a challenging period for companies of all shapes and sizes. However, there are always opportunities to grow and seize market share for those businesses with solid foundations in the shape of strong leadership and a clear sense of strategic direction. 


Jacob Ambrose Willson, Senior Editor, Criticaleye