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 1981 in a shoe factory in Tuscany, 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.

After military service I took over the finance department of a small distributor of home items. Then, in 1986, after a COBOL II course that convinced me software was going to change everything, I joined an IT company installing and supporting their ERP systems for businesses. 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 forced me to understand a different industry, a different set of constraints, a different way that money and materials moved through a system.

In 1992 I made an unexpected turn: I 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 and help companies turn it into action. It was early-stage information services before anyone called it that. The business grew steadily for a few years helping companies bridge the gap between marketing strategy and operational reality.

In 1997 I joined a national IT retailer as Channel Manager, first running large cash-and-carry accounts, then helping build an entirely new channel — a network of independent local stores operating under a national brand. Building something from scratch inside a large organisation is a different kind of education.

In 2003 I moved into general management, joining a paper company as General Manager. We created a brand of A4 paper — EcoCopia — and sold it to Esselunga, Coop Italia, and HP Europe. We also developed notebooks and other paper products. That experience of building a consumer brand from nothing, navigating large retail buyers and a multinational like HP, taught me things about throughput and commercial constraints that no textbook covers.

In 2005 I joined a turnaround team for an office furniture company held by Banca Intesa, first as General Manager and then as CEO. Turnarounds are where you learn fast: every decision has consequences, there's no room for local optimisation thinking, and the constraint is rarely where people think it is.

In 2008 I joined the board of Italy's most prominent Apple distributor, taking responsibility for finance. Over three years, the company grew from €80M to €210M in revenue. Watching — and helping manage — that kind of growth is its own education in what breaks under pressure and what holds.

In 2012, after thirty years of working inside businesses of every size and type, I started my own management consultancy.

Why Theory of Constraints

By the time I discovered Goldratt's work, I had already seen enough real businesses to recognise immediately what he was describing. The constraint that limits the whole system. The danger of local optimisation. 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 client 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 generic frameworks applied from the outside. 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 are me following a thread of curiosity, like the one connecting Nei Gong to throughput. I write because clarifying ideas in writing is how I understand them better myself. 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 glad to have a conversation. → Get in touch