The founder
Mark C. Ward
- 25
- years
- 45+
- senior advisory engagements
- 250+
- delivery projects
- 12
- countries
Founder, Revenue Arc
Mark C. Ward has spent 25 years in technology, software and services.
He works with private equity firms, the companies they own, and their boards, at the points where a decision is expensive and hard to reverse: before a deal, after an acquisition, while two companies are being joined, and when revenue growth slows.
The work covers everything that decides whether a company wins and keeps revenue, from strategy down to the human capital. His work has also covered the decisions above that: integrating an acquired business, bringing a board and an executive team to one agreed plan they will act on, facilitating corporate and GTM strategy with chief executives and their leadership teams, and finding the person who will run the company.
He has done this work in growth-stage companies and in global ones, across twelve countries.
Q&A with Mark
What defines you in this life?
What really defines me is the whole journey, not one role in it.
I can't point to being a dad, a husband or a founder and say that's me. Those things are a huge part of who I am, and they bring me considerable fulfilment. But it's the twists and turns, the painful lessons, and the ways I've grown that define me most. I used to say that I am a journeyman, restless and always seeking, always learning, never satisfied. In some ways that is still true, but I am more content nowadays.
What is the biggest risk you have ever taken?
Leaving the country of my birth, my family and my business.
My son has a rare blood condition that required treatment here, and we were able to leave Cape Town, move to Oxfordshire and watch his life transformed by the team at the John Radcliffe Hospital. Folding my life and business up in Cape Town in haste was difficult to do – there was no way to sell the company, and I learnt painful lessons about key-man dependence. I also had to leave my daughter in Cape Town to finish her schooling, and no words describe what that was like. And the pandemic, with the separation it caused, made it all much worse.
What inspired you to start Revenue Arc?
My love of systems, and cost to companies when they don't think in systems.
After many years in management consulting, I watched the same thing happen again and again. Companies failing at scale in ways that seemed invisible to them, despite the evidence. The problems causing them pain were less visible in the numbers but more in the system underneath them. And people generally don't think in systems. It took me years of training. I also grew weary of watching, and sometimes participating in, really dumb decisions and companies allocating resources to the wrong things at the wrong time. So Revenue Arc was started to close that gap.
What sets Revenue Arc apart?
We know what scales and what stalls, and we can prove it.
Under the work sits the deepest forensic study of B2B scale-ups I know of, why they fail and how the survivors differ. The more complicated the revenue system, the more we add. Private equity firms, among the most demanding buyers there are, trust us with their portfolio companies.
What is your one message to chief executives and investors?
Establish where you actually stand before you commit the money.
Most scaling decisions are made against a picture of the company that is partly story, driven by ambition and accelerated by pressure. Get an agreed position, from evidence, on the whole system rather than the parts, because each part only performs as well as the system around it. From an honest baseline, almost anything is fixable. From a false one, capital only adds to the flaws. If you want to know more, talk to me. My advice is free on the first call.