Most consultants advise from the outside. I've spent 40 years on the inside — in factories, warehouses, finance departments, and boardrooms.

I started my working life in a local shoe factory, running finance and accounts. I was twenty years old and had no idea that spending time inside a real production environment — watching how orders flowed, where things got stuck, how cash moved through a business — would shape everything that came after.

A few years later I moved into a small houseware distributor, again on the finance side. Then a COBOL II course convinced me that software was going to change everything, and I joined an IT company installing and supporting ERP systems. For six years I worked inside marble companies, textile mills, woodworking shops, paper factories — shop floors of every kind. I wasn't just installing software: I was learning how businesses actually worked from the inside out. Every implementation meant understanding a different industry, a different set of constraints, a different way that money and materials moved through a system.

From there I made an unexpected turn and co-founded a marketing company. The internet didn't exist yet for most businesses, but bulletin boards did, and we figured out how to use them to gather market intelligence. It was early-stage information services before anyone called it that.

Next came a national IT distributor, where I managed marketing for some large cash-and-carry stores and then helped build an entirely new channel from scratch — a network of independent local stores operating under a national brand.

Later, I moved into general management, joining a paper company as General Manager. We built a brand of A4 paper from scratch — EcoCopia — and got it onto the shelves of Esselunga, Coop Italia, and into HP Europe. Navigating large retail buyers and a multinational like HP teaches you things about throughput and commercial constraints that no textbook comes close to.

I was then involved in a turnaround: an office furniture company held by Banca Intesa, where I joined first as General Manager and then became CEO. Turnarounds are where you learn fast. Every decision has consequences, there's no room for local optimization thinking, and the constraint is rarely where people think it is. The business returned to profitability and was eventually acquired.

My last corporate role was on the board of Italy's most prominent Apple distributor, taking charge of finance. Over three years the company grew from €80M to €210M in revenue. Growing a business that fast puts every process, every person, and every assumption under pressure. You learn things you simply cannot learn any other way.

In 2012, having worked inside businesses of every size and type, I started my own consultancy.

How I found Theory of Constraints

By the time I came across Goldratt's work, I'd already seen enough real businesses to recognize immediately what he was describing. The constraint that limits the whole system. The danger of local optimization. The difference between a cost-world mentality and a throughput-world mentality. I hadn't had the language for it before — but I'd been watching it play out since 1981.

That's what I bring to engagements now: not just the methodology, but four decades of having been inside the problem. I work directly with management teams. No decks sent by email, no frameworks applied from a distance. The work is hands-on — mapping the real flow, finding the constraint, designing the fix, and staying long enough to make sure it holds.

Why I write

This site — Focus on Profit — is where I think out loud. Some posts are field notes from client work. Some follow a thread of curiosity, like the one connecting Nei Gong to throughput. I write because putting ideas into words is how I understand them better. And because most of what's written online about Theory of Constraints and CCPM is generic and untested. I'd rather add something that comes from actually being inside the room.

Let's talk

If you'd like to understand what's really limiting your business — and what to do about it — I'd be happy to have a conversation. → Get in touch