The person they call when growth stalls.
From Wall Street mergers and acquisitions to blue chip performance improvement, and now to the owner-led businesses that need it most.
Gerry Severin was born in Bavaria, Germany, and began his career on Wall Street working in mergers and acquisitions. It is an unusual place to start for someone who now spends his time with founder-led businesses, and it explains a great deal about how he works: he learned early to read a company by its numbers and its structure rather than by the story its owner tells about it.
He moved from finance into performance improvement consulting, and has spent over twenty years there. More than twenty performance improvement projects, working with blue chip companies, private equity firms and medium sized businesses. He is an Associate Partner of Columbus Management Group and a member of a private equity investor and mergers and acquisitions network.
What he found across all of it was not what he expected. The largest organisations were failing for the same reasons as the smallest ones, and the same reasons kept appearing across completely unrelated industries. Chaotic work and constant firefighting. Meetings that achieved nothing. Plans that were loosely defined and then quietly abandoned. Profits falling while sales rose. Owners who had lost their passion for a business they had built themselves.
That pattern became the Scaling Made Easy framework: a step by step process for building businesses that scale themselves, so that a successful owner operated company can grow without the owner having to hold every part of it together personally.
Alongside the consulting credentials he is an NLP Master Practitioner and a Certified Compassion Key Practitioner, which is a way of saying he works on the person as well as the operating model. In practice the second matters more. Most businesses are not stuck for want of a spreadsheet.
What Gerry actually enjoys is not the boardrooms. It is the moment a business owner realises they were never stuck at all. They were just missing a system.
The route here
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Start
Wall Street, mergers and acquisitions
Learning to read a business through its numbers and its structure, at the level where a misread costs a great deal of money.
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Corporate
Blue chip performance improvement
More than twenty performance improvement projects across insurance, energy, logistics, food and transport. Discovering that scale does not solve structure, it exposes it.
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Now
Owner operated businesses
Bringing billion dollar consulting systems and toolkits to founder-led companies, where a single change to structure moves everything and the owner can act on it the same week.
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Next
Beyond one person
Building Scaling Made Easy into something that reaches more businesses than one diary allows, which is the same problem Gerry solves for his clients.
What he brings to it
Associate Partner, Columbus Management Group
A working consulting practice behind him, not a coaching certificate and a website. The toolkits your business gets are the ones he uses on blue chip programmes.
Twenty years and twenty projects
More than twenty performance improvement programmes across blue chip companies, private equity portfolios and medium sized businesses. The problems rhyme, and having seen both ends means the pattern gets spotted faster.
NLP Master Practitioner
Most business problems are people problems wearing a business costume. This is the training that gets to the second layer.
Certified Compassion Key Practitioner
The Inner Mastery pillar of the framework is not decoration. Owners who are burned out do not implement operating models, and this is the work that addresses it.
Mergers and acquisitions network
A member of a private equity investor and M&A network, which is how qualifying clients get introductions to investors, advisors and project funding.
Wall Street, originally
He started in M&A before he started in consulting. He reads your numbers properly, including the ones you have stopped looking at.
Experience gained working with
Nobody is ever as stuck as they feel. They are just missing a system, and systems can be built.
Let's find your way through.
A direct conversation about where your business is stuck and what it would take to change that.
Talk to Gerry