In this episode, executive coach and former scale-up CEO Loic Potjes joins us to help CTOs, CIOs, and tech leaders break out of the "busy but stuck" cycle. We explore how to bring strategic clarity to your leadership, define a powerful USP, and position your company for exponential (not just incremental) growth.

🎯 Learn how to:

1. Escape the trap of surface-level innovation
2. Use AI as a strategic co-pilot, not a tactical bolt-on
3. Transform from technical expert to strategic leader
4. Lead with clarity, purpose, and structure, especially in fast-scaling environments

Chapters

00:00 Worldwide CEO Experience Perspective

06:23 Transitioning for the Future

11:30 Personal Growth as a CEO

14:07 Business-Tech Mistakes

21:52 Change and Improvement

29:22 Coaching Growth

34:49 Business AI Integration

41:50 Navigating the AI Hype

48:10 Simplifying Your Pitch

About Loic

Loic has a global perspective and 25 years of experience as a corporate/scale-up CEO, chairman and tech investor, and therefore uniquely qualified to partner with CEOs across diverse industries and growth stages. He has successfully launched, structured, and grown companies across mature and emerging markets, managing up to 4,000 employees at a time, with core expertise in go-to-market strategies, new technologies, innovation, and mergers & acquisitions.

Where to find Loic

• Website: https://www.disruptiveleap.com

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/loicpotjes/

Do you have a transformational view of the business as a CTO? Are you being transformational and strategic or are you doing more of the same with a twist? It's not even an 80/20, it's a 99/1 of more of the same with a twist. And it's again rooted in human risk aversion and because tech can do it.

All. Welcome to the CTO Compass podcast. I'm your host, Mark Wormcourt, tech strategist and executive coach. In every episode, we meet tech leaders from startup CTOs to enterprise by CIOs to explore what it means to lead in tech today. They share their stories and their lessons so that you can navigate your own journey in tech. Let's dive into today's episode. - Today's guest is somebody who's walked the CEO path. He's led a tech scale up, but a highly traditional 4,000 person organization in security tells in South America, which he completely turned around. Today he's an executive coach and he's coached over 50 CEOs all over the world. Loic Poitras is here today to share his lessons in leadership, what he's learned, escaping the hamster wheel and navigating today's very fast evolving words world, which is interesting to all of us.

So, Loic, welcome. Before we start, maybe a very quick intro?

Thank you, Mark. Thanks for having me on the podcast and really looking forward to our conversation. Essentially, yeah, quick intro. I'm originally from Belgium. Been doing emerging markets for 17 years.

So a lot of European-centric projects, a lot of Africa-Middle East projects. And so, Yeah, I've always loved a corporate CEO and a scale-up CEO turned entrepreneur, turned tech investor for a VC firm.

And then in a second midlife crisis, more recently, a CEO coach, married two teenagers, two dogs, and based in Johannesburg, South Africa currently.

Nice, beautiful city as well. So let's go straight into it. Right. I want to really want to get into the CEO. You coach a lot of CEOs.

So what are the because the leadership lessons for CEO, we can probably translate wider into tech. So what are some of the most common traps or issues that you see with CEOs that they fall into when they feel like stuck or overwhelmed and when they engage you?

So I think it's essentially to be too much on and for too long in the cold phase. And they end up losing that sense of perspective, working 12, 14 hours a day.

And then naturally, they feel a sense of dopamine as entrepreneurs by the end of the day, because they've had 100 meetings, they feel they've moved a lot of things. But essentially, that dopamine is fake, as in there's probably very little that they've done in terms of moving the needle on the 80-20 on the stuff that really matters. And so the first thing they come to look for in coaching is that sense of clarity and perspective by someone that asks them all the stupid questions, as in, what are you doing with? What's your USP? What are you trying to achieve? What's your next 80-20?

So I think... There's many more roadblocks and bottlenecks, but if there was one thing. As to why CEOs who are coached overperform on average those who aren't. That would be that.

That 20% that really moves the needle versus the other busy work as well that they do. I know that sounds very simple, but if it was simple, they would have done it themselves maybe already.

So how do you help them get to that 20% that actually moves the needle, that makes a difference?

So I've worked with the exponential model quite a bit. So the first phase of my stint as a CEO in South Africa was building an organization.

So I bought a number of companies and I built a corporation to 4,000 employees, doubling the size every year. But then we were faced with a market change. And we had to reinvent the wheel or die in the doing. And so... We moved from a services-intensive business into high-tech, high-margin leasing, the beginning of AI at the time. But so tech was the easy part. And so that's the first message for tech people. Tech is always the easy part. It's a line of code. Yes, there's a level of... But adoption, change management, scoping, market adoption, all of that are where... The strategic CTOs could position themselves versus doing yet another tech or AI fluff project or whatever the case may be. And so back to my story, I had the blood noses and the hard learnings and the scars from the change management and people moving a traditional organization to, you know, So after the blood noses and the scars, we started accelerating and get a few lessons under the belt. And we ended up quadrupling the EBIT of the group of companies.

So from a threat, it became a success. And then... I got overexcited. I said, hey, I'm done doing that CEO, that corporate exec kind of thing, and let me do something more entrepreneurial. And so I felt, and I call that the exponential model. And not so much from theory or slides or what, but from the hard lessons learned, What biontic. Does it take to then marry tech with a business model as in something very concretely a positioning that the market would buy, a differentiated positioning, then go to market, then USP, then how do you start shaping differently? And so The exponential model for me is the key in the heart to why CEOs and here CTOs can position themselves to then accelerate and seek outsized returns or next steps essentially.

Okay. Can you give an example of somebody that you coached where you made that happen?

I mean, this was your story. So some of the coaches that you worked with and without naming names, of course, I mean, fully confidential, but give me an example, a story.

Yeah, so one example is in Miami. They take a mid-sized scale-up that has a long track record in delivering good old development projects on cost and materials base and so on and so forth. And they now see the possibility to transition into something sexier, AI projects and so on and so forth. But they're a little bit stuck in the middle. They're a bit stuck in the middle because their model, their pricing model, their positioning, their credibility, how the market perceives them needs to change.

So then with the CEO, a super smart lady, we started to now plot What needs to shift? And so the what needs to shift started tackling the following key elements to say first Let's define the actual opportunity. And so very tangibly, if you make 20% gross margin on current projects, then what's going to be good enough on the new stuff? And if it's not 40%, then don't bother.

So that's the next metric. Okay, what kind of approach would give us that 40%? Then you start building the actual tool and positioning because now you need to move away from the old narrative, selling hours by the kilo. Now, how do you do that? And the first shift could be, what are the three verticals where we actually have been as that business reasonably successful and where we have kind of already something that could look like a toolbox, something which we can copy-paste where we don't have to recreate the code and the machine from A to Z. Because that then builds with productivity and then builds less hours with still a palatable fee.

And then you can start achieving that 40%. And then you move from 60% client ready to 65, 75, 85. And when you become super specialized, 95%. And that's the happy days of your margin. And somehow you've moved from hours by the kilo. But so that's the first steps in the journey.

So what are the three verticals? What are the key products?

And then you move away from shotgun approach, spray and paint, to more verticals. Focused on what are those verticals? Is the market big enough? Can we scale? Do we have credibility? And now the following step is What's our crisp USB differentiator? What have we done? That stands out. And because we've done time and materials, then we first feel as a team, come on, we don't have much. Or, it's just some lofty marketing materials. But actually, we all know. But there's always nuggets of wisdom. If you look back in the last five years and what is the one, a couple of things that we saw quite a bit, and you start finding these nuggets and you start then saying, well, hang on. We're actually great at that, and that we feel we could reproduce. And we've got a team of five or 15 people who are actually a bit special. And so you start with that beachhead. In that vertical and that core team, you crystallize your USP, and then you need that first or two or three victims, as in clients who are saying, hey, we think it's cool, and for a bit of a carrot, be it an early bird. Kind of being the champion if they're the or if there's something that attracts the early birds in the client side and where you start testing that And so I'm being long-winded, but you can start the pieces of puzzle that start to shape.

And then eventually you get to the 80-20. So we no longer have 20% of high margin, 80% low margin, but the other switch. And now we, in the meantime, got to be credibly. But that gets built over time.

And then the coaching space is each time twice a month where you're saying, okay, where are we? Where are we stuck? Where are we not flowing? Is it the USP? Is it the team? Is it the key profiles that we're missing? Is it credibility? Is it the engine? And you start each time looking at what is in the way of flowing? What is the next 80-20? What is the next move? And who's going to be accountable for what in the next couple of weeks? And so essentially, you become the sparring partner. Of the CEO and the team to work on the business, not in the business, because you are hours away, flight hours away from the business. You are naturally extracted from the day-to-day. And so you're solely helping them to work on the business.

And to change the business and move it forward instead of just operating I'm sure that in your coaching, you find there's a lot of, I mean, you just talked about a lot of business growth, right, and business development and changing the business. But I'm sure that in the coaching, you find there's a lot of personal growth or personal realizations that CEOs have in that process. What's that relationship and how do you see that in your coaching?

Yeah, that's a brilliant question because it matters. It is everything, actually, because you can have the perfect strategic plan, tick all the boxes, have the perfect slides and so on and so forth, but you need an engine in the room. And that is the CEO and his or her team and the core And so one thing I always do, I work with one psychometric assessment. But one that doesn't speak about competency. But that speaks about appetence, pleasure of working, talent. Because when we do flow and we do crystallize and recognize our great talents, then what we're good at, and then important, what we are not so good at, what we're crap at, and what we should stay away from, then you start flowing naturally into more, and consciously and unconsciously into talent. Into your flow, into what you're uniquely great at, then you should be more successful because you naturally excel at that and you should experience more joy, more fulfillment, more passion and so on and so forth rather than being stuck with the stuff that no one else has to do.

So as a CEO, you end up doing it. And so, then you do the same for your team. And so how do we complement each other? And so it's unlocking the passion and it's far better to have a strategy that then is linked and aligned to the great talent of the CEO and the core team, rather than the perfect strategy, but you're trying to square peg the CEO into that perfect strategy. That kind of never works.

So it's unlocking the passion, the virality and so on. And so it's a blend of assessments, of role playing, of experience sharing until they're fully clear, until they've learned to flow as a team. In their respective passions, with vulnerability, with authenticity. And that actually To me, That's 80% of the success factor because the strategy is never that super complicated at the end of the day. But finding the flow That's what most companies don't get to.

For the entire team, not just the CEO, but the entire management team. So they all pick up their own roles and pieces. I want to get a bit more into tech. You've coached tech founders as well. You've actually been a CEO of a SaaS company yourself.

So what are some of the biggest leadership mistakes that you see in those fast-scaling startups in the tech startup world?

Legacy... Patchwork of Legacy... The inertia of habits? For example, we had... It's my baby.

So all the human trades that you find back into our tech environments. So one thing came to mind is that we thought in the last investment that our investors and we had bought into a SaaS platform only to realize that it wasn't quite that. It was a kind of an enterprise platform that still was reliant on quite a bit of integration manually, certainly far away from Netflix platforms. Key in your credit card and boom you're on the subscription ARR and happy days of growth virality it was still very muddy And... It's square pegging the reality you want it to be. It's actually the lipstick on the page. You think I've got a beautiful queen here. I'm buying into something amazing and it's the next billion dollar idea, but you haven't had your reality check. And what you bought is a pig with lipstick, which is less sexy when you realize it is.

And then from there, What I've seen is that some investors can't quite get to the narrative to the penny drop moment And then you keep forcing the reality you would want to be on a, and then your EV might not be that sexy and so on. But actually, the sooner you confront reality to say, okay, a second lesson learned, for example, was we wanting to move from one project to three projects. And my baby's beautiful pitfall was, our key competitors just had learned the lesson the hard way they had launched a brand new exciting product into a new legislative space that sounded like the hot new thing and they had it They had launched it far too soon. It wasn't perfect and there weren't quite a bit of backlinks. They had to put it from the market. We were clear internally. We could explain very easily what they call mistakes was and so on because we had perspective on them. It wasn't our baby. When something quite similar happened to us, moving from a one product platform to a second, a third problem and reorganizing the architecture. And when the CTO, founder, couldn't read the signs. And wouldn't read the signs. And would still pretend that the baby is beautiful and with a bit more lipstick and it was going to be absolutely perfect. And so that sense of not seeing reality which is, again, it's not tech-related, it's human behavior. It's shortcomings related with the best of intentions. People want to really the best for their clients, for the business, for the So those are some of the core learnings. The inability Who? Keep up to date. And when I say with tech development, and when I say that, I don't mean registering yourself for the next 10 fluffy AI workshops and how to do or how to change the world in five minutes kind of thing, but more... It's that bridge between where you are and where you could be. And when I say that, I think about, let's say, AI. I think people The grave mistake of 80% of CTOs and CEOs is, It's... You use AI for more of the same with a twist. What I mean by that is 99.9% of the businesses have a current business model. They have a track record. They're vested on their rails.

And then what feels less risky is you know, risk averse human mindset is to work on the continuation of digital transformations, automation, workflows, business optimization, and which will lower a little bit the cost, give you a slight edge. And okay, you can grab a couple of percentage of EBIT margin and it's all good and well, and people should do that. And it's only 0.1% that would leverage AI from a greenfield, from a brand new started point of view.? But because we've got 99.9% of existing business and we are risk averse and we don't think naturally outside of the box, we do more of the same with a twist. Instead of using AI for its real power, which is how do I create... A strong sustainable strategic advantage.

Like for example, I'm speaking to law firm or professional services firm. All the tech tools are there off the shelf. For AI, they can actually overnight reduce 40% of their cost base or grab 40% more client base through and 80 20 on workflow automation and rep package towards the clients. Not saying if I've now nailed the 40% advantage, I can give 15% to my clients. And 15% is good enough as a carrot to clean the market, And I can transform the other 25% to double up my bottom line. Now if I can accelerate my growth and bit by bit, But that's too threatening. And because it's too threatening and we're not sure how clients will react and we find a hundred, but it's not about the clients. It's about all fear of change. In the boardroom, in the CTO environment and everywhere. And we end up doing baby steps. Instead of jumping in the pool and start swimming and see if we sink or not, we put a toe in the water and we think, geez, we have something. Or, you know, we do AI transformation.

Yeah. We've automated our invoicing. Wow, that's beautiful.

Well, it hasn't moved a needle. But it feels we're not behind on the AI and so on. And so on. But it's like we're doing something in management.

You know, management is a broad term. Are you managing the receptionist or are you managing BCG or McKinsey? Or, you know, it's management.

So when we speak about AI, The key is it transformational? And do you have a transformational view of the business as a CTO? Are you being transformational and strategic? Or are you doing more of the same with a twist? It's not even an 80-20, it's a 99-1. Of more of the same with a twist. That is the thing. And it's again rooted in human risk aversion and because tech can do it all.

I mean, well, not all, but in many things.

Yeah, absolutely right. And I think you hit the nail on the head. I think that the ones that approach you for coaching, you mentioned this, Caleb in Miami, they fully already understood that and they have seen this market model, maybe not quite sure how to do it, but they've sought help and they've actually gone about it. The other 99.9%, not sure what the exact percentage is there, of course, but just dip their toe in the water or just automate with AI, I see a lot of that as well. How do you From Vince, how do you get started? Leaders, like CEOs across that big hurdle, that fear of change?

So I think you don't. The thought is that some people... Have it in them.

So if you take 10 people, you probably have one or two that are naturally born early adopters. These are the guys who order the new stuff at home and they can't wait until unscrewing the screen and seeing how it all works and seeing what they can do.

And then you have the people in the middle who wait to say, that's kind of new. I'm not sure. But actually when it's kind of working, they kind of, they can dip a toe and then a foot and then a leg in the water.

And then at the other end of the spectrum, you have the naysayers. And those are the guys you can bring to the water, but you won't make them drink. And so... The key is not to focus there. I think in CEO coaching, you have a natural selection. First, the guys who know it all. They typically don't come for coaching. They know it all already.

So, yeah, the guys who are coming for coaching have that natural sense of, I feel I can learn. I do realize I don't know it all. And I am opening myself up to other points, other people who can help me learn and co-learn. People who come for coaching have the natural mindset. And so that's why Harvard Business Reviews and other international studies, I think that's one of the key reasons there's a self-selection as to why those who go for coaching outperform on average those who aren't. Because it's not just that coaching is wonderful or whatever, whether it is or it is not, but it attracts the right kind of people. And that natural intellectual curiosity will lead you to learn, to develop yourself where others who know it all will be static.

So that's the first thing that comes to mind. And then two, The CEO's got to want change and it's got to realize that what you do is empowerment. I use quite a bit of Gen AI. I've built a couple of agentic Gen AI on top of to do what? To just do workflows and thinking flows into the methodology of thinking of transformation levers or leadership scaling and so on. It's nothing extraordinary new. Just AI does it substantially quicker, substantially better insights, cleaner, fresher, and it's more fluid and flows. But, over a couple of sessions, they get to understand, okay, it doesn't have to be scary. We can do some experiential-based learning, we can see that it's possible, we can put it into bite-sized, first project, next step, next.

So it becomes kind of tangible. It's not about are you a marathon swimmer? It's about let's define what putting a toe in the water means. And does it happen on Monday or on Tuesday? And so With the hand-holding and the framework, but you need the right type of open spirit in the room, then you can equip them and you start the journey. Then in their organization, there's a bunch of change agents naturally and there's a bunch of naysayers and it's kind of mapping the space And again, it's more about that. Then it is about the perfect tech or the perfect strategy.

Yeah. And I think I recognize that adoption curve, the early adopters, the mainstream and then the laggers.

So are you saying that if I'm a board and I'm hiring a CEO or I'm hiring my next CEO, that it's a fast changing world? I mean, technology, AI, everything is developing so fast and businesses need to adopt. If I'm hiring for those roles, I should almost specifically look for that first five or 10 percent, those roles. One that are wanting change, that are willing to adopt, that are willing to go for it?

So I would say it's a bit, so I would actually not say that. What I would say is to be careful with the naysayer because these are the guys you want changed.

So I wouldn't say that it's a good thing to recruit one unless It's about fit for purpose. If you're in a financial institution and you need for your risk, your credit function, your risk function, Don't go with a born crazy innovator because your risk function might look very scary quickly. And maybe a naysayer is the perfect fit for purpose then.

So it's about fit for purpose is the thought. So there's that curve of adoption that you were referring to. And in driving change in organization, it's about knowing.

So if you are the CEO, it's like the analogy of the soccer coach, the football coach. You need to know who are the attackers. The attackers are the guys who are going to run for the ball. They're going to find it enthusing. They're going to run fast. They're going to go for it. High energy, lots of new ideas and stuff. Those are the kickstarters. You need those four, but don't bring them. At the very end of the spectrum of maturity to cross the T's and dot the I's, you'll bore them to death.

You know, as the defenders. Yeah.

So next you have your midfielders. Your midfielders are, okay, there's a project that's now shaped and trial and tested and piloted and so on. We've got some key learning and now it's about integrating that in 80% of the business. These are your midfielders. It's a different skill set. Don't ask the crazy innovator that wants to brainstorm for the hundred times. No, it's not about that anymore now. It had its purpose. The next step is the defenders to go at maturity and then the goalie to cross the T's and dot the I's.

So everyone is fit for purpose. You can't have only wild innovators. You can't have only naysayers. You need to know as a coach, as a CEO, What stage... Of the project you're in and who's fit for purpose. And if you want to change You still have your legacy business today that pays the bills somehow. You can't destroy it overnight.

So whilst you're doing the lab and the piloting, you need to have that... Staged management in steps and you still need the guys that have been there for 50 years, hold the fort, hold the stability. But it's fit for purpose what comes to mind. Now, if you're considerably short on one aspect, if you don't have a single innovator in your world, then you have a problem.

Yeah.

Chris. - Okay, so it's having the mix of the innovators and even the new innovations, right? Again, the Miami startup, which you talked about, at some point that's going to get very, I'd say almost operational after one, two years, and then you still need those defenders to actually take that and run it and make sure that it keeps running the way that it's supposed to run and maybe go for new innovations with your attackers. -.

The next few years, maintaining the same train on the same rails at the same speed with perfect exact, so you need those guys, the strong operators, whilst the crazy people keep inventing and testing and so on and so.

Forth. Okay, I want to get a bit more into, I mean, you do a lot of leadership coaching. There's a lot of, traditional CEOs, people that have been in leadership functions for a long time before they got into a CEO role. They've grown up from team management to middle management to senior management and finally to a CEO. In startups and scale-ups, you see a very different thing. You have these early founders and they start as a founder because they have this cool idea and suddenly they are running a 40, 50, 100, 200, 500 people company. And they have never learned to lead along the way. They haven't had that career growing up through the ranks. How do you, have you seen those as well? And how do you coach them in their leadership? Because they need to grow up So much faster than maybe the traditional CEO that's had the years and the decades to go through the ranks.

Yeah, definitely. What comes to mind is kind of a toolbox. And the toolbox needs to be always two steps ahead.

So if it's a fast scaling company, what you usually find is that the CEO in his head is three steps ahead. Whereas the rest of the organization, the trains left the station and they're trying to run behind the train in terms of process, people, organizations, structures. Everything is a couple of steps typically behind. And you've got that CEO with great enthusiasm running in front, moving that next mountain. And so you need to replace that with two steps ahead. And the toolbox then works on two fronts. It's the toolbox of what's needed in terms of structure, organization and so on in the company. Do you need a share plan? Do you need a KPI structure? Do you need the first board structure? Or advisory board structure how does that look like what are the essentials what are the and over a 90-minute session it's all there there's no need to go each time to a consultant to have an HR and salary benchmark kind of a thing or in whatever field of the business the power of ai is that you take the power of ai and an old guy with gray hair like me that's been around a little bit and then You realize, okay, it's not about for a board pack to give you the 300-page report that a listed entity would be. That's not fit for purpose. But what's the four-page kind of thing that nails the essence, bullet point style, that will engage you with your investors and your board in a meaningful manner? And how do you get that kind of automated in a quick thing or GPT on top of chat GPT so that you don't have to like those practical, super practical tips to say, this is the thing over 90 minutes, you've understood the core principle. You've understood the, here's the actual pack, go draft it. We've gone through it to where we've kind of done the first one together. What comes to mind? What would, what happened? And so you're good to go because these guys are quick learners and Once you put them on the saddle, you can't solve for everything in a toolbox like that. If you have a deep structure, tax exposure or whatever, you still need the tax consultant and whatever.

So it's not a solve it all. But more than often, you've got an 80-20 there to preempt the steps and the structure at what speed you want. Then you've got the same toolbox, but for leadership.

So, you move from technical expert because you are a founder or CTO or whatever and you've got that but now you move to more managerial style and all of a sudden you're a high speed trained manager with a couple of hundred or fewer hundred employees Managing investors, stakeholders, market, communication, building the next... And so all of a sudden your role has significantly changed. And so what are the... What does it take to lead at that level? To lead leaders. What are the three skills that you need to develop? How can we relay that? It's extraordinarily personal learning. It's not textbook or Udemy or whatever. It's really where are you at? In that very areas, what are the key principle? Where is the last three times where you failed at it and why? What does it say about you? Where's the last three times where it flowed, it worked for you. What did you do that worked? Can we do more of that? If you were to change one thing, what would it be? And here's a couple of then core insights, three to five key principles that you can get and use as a reference is when I am faced with this, I can remind myself of these three core bullet points and boom, I can, and we've role played in CEO coaching about, and if there's that super difficult CTO that you are dependent from because there's nothing too much on the bed, but he, he's got it all in his head and you've got that reliance and you're not sure to how to have that difficult conversation and so on and so forth.

Well, how do you role play this difficult conversation? How do you learn to be in your shoes? How do you grow? Maturity? How do you grow grounding presence? How do you..

Yeah, all of that comes to mind essentially.

I love that. And I think that second part needs a lot more of a coach, right?

Somebody to brainstorm with, to hold you accountable. The first part, I liked that as well. You said these very practical things like a KPI model, an operating model, a board deck, how do you put a board together? And you can ask AI.

Somewhere you've said that AI should be your And I think there's something we couldn't do five years ago, but you can do that now. What do you tell CEOs about how to use AI as their private co-pilot?

So I tell them that the analogy is like having a young team of 100 Harvard graduates who are BCG or McKinsey consultants. They're super bright, they're super quick, they're super intelligent, but they definitely lack the gray hair, the sense of complexity, the depth, and so on and so forth. It's too quick to jump the gun, too much energy. They're great at synthesizing, great at generating some, but Do not... Do not accept it as the Bible. You wouldn't do that with a young, bright consultant. You would query to say, dude, you're missing a point here. That's not good enough. No, there is a legal environment that says this. And so you keep poking and dancing with the AI to force it to go to death. I tell the AI, stop hallucinating, stop doing that. You jumped the gun with a seven-day activation plan to solve the world in five minutes.

Sounds amazing, not very practical. Can we take two steps back? And I demonstrate for them how to dance with AI on the strategic level because most of them don't get there because they said, I asked this question, which was a pretty vague question, and then I got this vague answer, so it doesn't work. No.

Well, first, you wouldn't ask that vague question to a consultant. The consultant would have 10 clarifying questions.

Well, tell AI to ask you 10 clarifying questions. Okay, I can do that. Okay.

And then you force them to dance with the AI. And then they have surprising results and it's learning to swim. It's learning to... The first time feels amazing but a bit uncomfortable and then you learn more and more as you go to use it on a more strategic, useful level rather than to write that email or summarize that meeting notes.

And I think that makes sense. I mean, if you're hiring a BCG or McKinsey, you're paying them, let's say, 100K for their advice. You're going to think very carefully about the question that you're going to ask and how you're going to ask that question. You're just going to fire off a vague question and hope for a best answer.

So I think with AI, The same is absolutely true as well. Definitely.

And then still, I think that's the first lesson for the CEOs. We're now seeing a big push from boards, but CEOs to just go and embed AI, right? We must have AI in our company. And I think that's sort of the end of that statement. They're not sure where or how. CEOs often don't know how to start and where to start.

So they just say to their CIO or CTO, go and make use of AI. How do you think about that and what should CEOs do instead?

So I have a great anecdote for that. So a few years ago, it wasn't so much about AI, but the best new thing was data management. And people needed to have data lakes and they had to have a data strategy and then all of that. It was all about data and so on, and then machine learning and so on and so forth.

So I'm there in the corner office of a big mining group, a global mining group, the CEO and the CTO. The CTO goes, great, someone I can talk to about my data strategy. He says, no, here's what we want to do with data. We want to do a data lake, and then we want to structure the data, and we want to clean the data, and then we want to do this, and then we have the architecture there. And so, and he said, what do you think? I said, geez, it sounds fantastic, but I have a stupid question. What will you see yourself doing with that data? I don't know, but at least we have a data strategy and we have data architecture. They had a data strategy for the sake of having one, essentially, and had no clue what to do with it. And so... That's the same thing with AI now. It's new, so we're not sure how to, what do you have? Yes, we have a data. We have an AI working stream thing. We have this. We have that. We scope things. What are you trying to do with it?

Well, we're not sure as yet, but can we tell you tomorrow? Okay. And that's obviously wrong. It's not very helpful.

So... People should first trust themselves and the fact that they experienced business people And if they don't behave stupidly with a normal project, such as building a routing system for cars or time in attendance, and so they're going to ask the right question. What is the efficiency? What are we solving for? Is it more is to take at a lower cost price than doing it manually or whatever? The simple, basic. But for some reason, we think AI is that big new thing. We feel very afraid of that.

Like I'm going to ask stupid questions. I'm going to look dumb. No, trust yourself. And so first. Have a feel and a glimpse on what AI can do and it changes every day, but then find the gaps in your organization where you feel, okay, so if we could, and first validate a business concept. Can I lower my cost 15% by doing this? How would that look like? I know I can't. Okay, no, but I think we believe we can do 11% lower cost. Okay, is that good enough? What is the ROI? How much would it cost? Apply that normal logical thinking. Have several scoping projects learn its first business. Then AI. AI is a stupid tool. It's a very clever tool, but I'm saying stupid tool because people use it stupidly?

So they should learn And people are getting in three years from now. Everyone will say, of course. And there will be another shiny new thing, which may be quantum computing or whatever it will be. But... The simple thing is apply the same logic Fine. 10 use cases? Scope them on a high level, prioritize them by lowest cost or quickest, lowest cost of investment, quickest return, and then biggest gap that your problem that you've solved, and then prioritize these first and then do the first one, do the second one, but apply the practical business thinking. You've done it for machine learning. You've done it for digital integration. You've done it for Excel sheets before. You've done it so nothing You under the sun, same old business thinking and pragmatic logic applies.

So do apply it would be the key thing.

And I think for a lot of companies, this is another transformation. And I think these, all these tech transformations are coming faster and faster with the years because tech is developing so rapidly. You led Securitas yourself through this big tech driven transformation from very people oriented to a lot more. Tech supported, still people oriented, but more tech supported. What can other CEOs, modern CEOs in the AI hype learn from your experience?

I would say that have your eyes set on first What is your strategic positioning? Redefine competition. Let me take an example. We had guards, security guards walking around, let's say, an industrial premises or a shopping mall or an office park. And so, yeah, let's say you have 20 guards walking around. On each moment around the fence, you cannot have a guard every two meters.

So inevitably, the guard is walking around. And so when the guard is not in the right corner, the rest of the fence is not quite protected. But people say, I need security guards. And so how much for your security guard? That's the competition. And is he better trained or equipped? That's the thing.

So very much a commodity space. Now people say, okay, so we can have cameras around the perimeter, but there's a certain cost to that and so on. But then... AI-enabled cameras where you can have long-range cameras and a piece of AI behind it, which they not all have, but at the time it was the new shiny thing and it was kind of behavioral pattern recognition.

So if pixels in the shape of a human body walk towards the wall and then jump it, then raise an alarm. Yeah. Instead of having a controller sleeping 12 hours a day in front of the screen and hoping that it will catch the writer. And so essentially what I'm saying is okay so the equation became to the market what's the usb When you have enough guards walking around, we can replace it with a high-tech leasing solution? And when I say high-tech, it's just a software. The rest is a good old camera with a good old piece of wire or wireless.

So that's not very special. It's just fit for purpose. And so you move from shiny new strategy to something, okay, when there's enough guards, I can calculate for a buyer in 30 seconds in front of him what his three-year saving will be. It says... Okay, you understand that when the guard walks around you not protected every meter all the time. You understand that when the software is there, you will be protected 100% of the time. Yes. Okay, so you get better. Yes. If I can guarantee you 15%. Price discount over three years, and if I've miscalculated my price, it's on me, not on you. Guaranteed pricing. Are you game? Yes. Now, that is a differentiated positioning.

So, The mistake was When we first So that ability to do behavioral pattern recognition, we had all our clients in the big showroom saying, I'm showcasing the data. Was everyone wowed? Yes, everyone thought it was fantastic. Who bought? No one. Why? Because it looked like, okay, it's exciting, but I'm not sure what I can do with it. And so, yeah, back to the good old gods.

Yeah. - But the real effort is for CEO, back to your question is, understand what the tech can do, define a differentiated strategic positioning in a vertical, in a niche that's big enough, that you can have a massive competitive advantage You can then organize your organization in a slick way, consistent way for delivery of that.

And then you can have outside success and you leverage tech at the service of this, but it's first business model change. And so that's the key learning for me. And that's what I would suggest others do. To look.

At. And it's almost a like for like story. You could almost take that story and apply it almost directly to AI.

I mean, for you, it was camera, it was movements or recognition of what happened on the camera, sort of a very early machine learning AI functionality and replacing physical security cards that just monitor the whole perimeter with AI enabled cameras. So it's almost the exact same thing that we see happening now where we are augmenting people with AI or agents or something else. And it doesn't mean all the people go away. It just means changing, focus on business positioning instead of the new tech.

Fancy. Yeah, because now we need less jobs, but more specialized ones. We needed more technicians. We needed more control room operators. We needed more reaction teams when there's an alert to go on site and verify.

So less jobs, but more senior jobs, better paid jobs, better remunerated, better training opportunities. And so, yeah, it's... And we took great care. But because we had a strategic advantage, we kept growing and acquiring more clients. And so never ever Did we have too many people? Because The perimeter is better done by a machine, but if you need to search people at the entrance or if you need to do certain practical...

So the human is very much necessary in security guards. And so the point is we were replacing guards with machines on some aspects of the business. But as we were growing, we were systematically always short. Of manpower because we had an accelerated growth that was outmatching the replacement of the machine. And so some competitors must have lost along the way, but clients got better service.

Yeah, there was better protection, security. So there was a virtuous positive cycle. And so, yeah, it's about seeing the full picture as well. I think that's important.

Last question. If you had to ask our listeners, right, who are mostly their tech leaders and founders, if they had to ask themselves one uncomfortable question to launch their growth or to seriously... Consider how they're doing today. What would that one question be?

The key question would be, Are you doing more of the same with a twist? Or Are you positioned strategically into such a strong advantage that captured in five words of your USP or elevator pitch You can convince any client, any investor, and they will get it. Five words, not six. What is that one key positioning that differentiates you. And one of two things. If you don't have that, then stop working harder. And focus on creating that whatever would work for you and get that right Otherwise, you just want more vanilla ice cream. If you do have the strategic positioning, but it's not quite consistent, it's not clear, it's not crisp, it's not crystallized, then do crystallize it. Test it with a 10-year-old boy. Or girl, if they don't get it, go back to the drawing board. It's got to be that simple.

And then communicate it consistently, and then align your business to that. It's hard enough to be great at one thing, But not everything is a golden goose.

So just focus on the one thing and scale on the back of that. And then you'll have outlier results.

Very interesting. Loic, thank you very much for being here, for coming on the podcast. Where can people find you if they want to learn more or learn more about you or connect with you?

Yeah, with absolute pleasure. So I typically work with CEOs and key execs from let's say $15 million of annual revenue to half a billion.

So that kind of scale up early stage to more mature stages. And then very easy to get hold of me. It's disruptiveleap.com. Disruptiveleap.com and there's email chat Calendly and to get in touch and learn a little bit more and with absolute Thank you, Mark, for having me.

Pleasure. Appreciate it very much.

Look, thank you for coming on today.

Great to be on the podcast with you.

As we wrap up another episode of the CTO Compass, thank you for taking the time to invest in you. The speed at which tech and AI develop is increasing, demanding a new era of leaders in tech. Leaders that can juggle team and culture, code and infra, cyber and compliance. All whilst working closely with board members and stakeholders. We're here to help you learn from others, set your own goals and navigate your own journey. And until next time. Keep learning. Keep pushing and never stop growing.