The brief was straightforward and the situation was not. A business with real customers, real revenue and a cost base built for a market that had moved on. The work was less about invention than about sequencing: deciding what had to be true first, and refusing to start anything that depended on a step nobody had taken yet.

We began by cutting the roadmap to a single line of work and holding it there for two quarters against considerable internal pressure. That decision produced the evidence everything else was built on. The rest of the programme — the systems, the hiring, the eventual transaction — followed from having something true to point at.