The OSCA Story
Forty years of operational diagnostics, and the missing piece they revealed.
OSCA is not a theoretical framework. It was built from four decades of direct engagements, each one building capability that the next one would draw on. The methodology, the diagnostic structure, and the central conviction that the gap between an organisation's layers is the diagnostic finding, all of it came from specific businesses, specific problems and specific patterns that recurred until they could no longer be dismissed as coincidence.
The Career Arc
Early 1980s: first turnaround. David's first business recovery was a light commercial vehicle components manufacturer. The financial picture looked workable. The operational reality, once you spent time inside the business, was structurally different. That gap, between the picture a business presents and the reality of how it actually runs, became the diagnostic question he has carried forward into every engagement since.
Late 1980s: Remploy. Five years at Remploy, the social-purpose manufacturing organisation, gave David a structural education in how operational realities, workforce capability and commercial pressure intersect in businesses where the easy levers, such as restructuring, redundancies or sector exits, are not available. The experience anchored a conviction that runs through OSCA today: that the best operational diagnostics treat the workforce and the leadership as the central variables, not as costs to be optimised around.
The 1990s: Bullough. Eight years inside Bullough, an international mid-cap manufacturing and engineering conglomerate, opened the door to larger commercial businesses and to working across European borders for the first time. This was the period that broadened David's operational range from single-business recovery to the post-acquisition integration work that would define much of what came next.
InTechnology Managed Services: growth, profitability and commercial channels. A subsequent engagement with InTechnology Managed Data and Networking Services proved a thesis that has run through every commercial engagement since: that sustainable growth in technology services depends as much on the architecture of the sales channel as on the product itself. The work delivered material growth and profitability improvement and, more importantly, demonstrated what an effective commercial channel structure looks like when built deliberately rather than allowed to emerge by default.
Allasso: European IT security transformation and exit. InTechnology became the springboard for a more ambitious engagement: joining Allasso, the European IT security business, as part of a major transformation programme. The work culminated in a successful exit to a larger German IT services and value-added distribution organisation. It was the first engagement in which David was part of the leadership team responsible for a transformation that ran end to end, from operational rebuild through to a completed M&A outcome.
A global mobile technology business. Between Allasso and Achilles, David worked with a global mobile technology business, extending the operational diagnostic experience across a more complex international footprint and a more demanding regulatory and commercial environment. The engagement reinforced the central lesson of the earlier work: that the executive view of a business and the operational view are almost never the same picture, and that the gap between them is where deal value is either preserved or lost.
Achilles: the foundation of The 7 Pillars. The Achilles engagement, spanning several years working across a large and widely distributed supply-chain services business, became the foundation of David's most consequential intellectual work. Through the Achilles Best Practice programme, David identified seven streams of performance and non-performance that recurred across operationally complex businesses, and built a structured methodology for improving capability down each one. This work became The 7 Pillars, both as a methodology in practice and, later, as the published book. The performance improvements achieved in the businesses where the Pillars methodology was applied were significant and largely self-evident in the results.
Further engagements. Subsequent work has included a sustainability software business (CR360) and further founder-led and PE-backed engagements covering operational diagnostics, growth strategy, leadership transition and post-acquisition integration. Across these contexts, the recurring finding has been consistent: founders and executive teams consistently underestimate how much commercial and technical weight key individuals personally carry, and how much of that weight cannot be transferred without explicit structural work. The OSCA's Key Person Dependency dimension was built to surface this finding before it becomes the central conversation in a deal room rather than the central conversation in a boardroom.
Operational interim leadership. Across this period David has also stepped in as an interim director where leadership transitions required focused support, typically for six to twelve months, often during periods of capital structure change or post-acquisition integration. The OSCA's 30-, 60- and 90-day roadmap discipline was forged in those engagements: a deliberate, sequenced programme of structural interventions designed to move a business from viable but at risk to credibly investable within a single operational cycle.
From 7 Pillars to OSCA
The 7 Pillars methodology, developed through the Achilles engagement and refined across subsequent work, addressed a specific question: how do you systematically improve performance down each of the streams that define how a business actually runs? Seven streams, applied to the right business stream in the right business, produced strong and demonstrable performance improvement. The methodology worked. The book that followed in 2024 codified it.
But a second question remained open. Why, despite the maturity of due diligence as a practice, do so many M&A engagements still fail to deliver against the expectations of investors, owners or incoming leadership? The Pillars worked vertically, improving performance down each business stream. The persistent failure pattern was something else. It sat horizontally across the organisation, in the operational, structural and people-alignment factors that determine whether a business can actually execute the plan it has been valued against.
OSCA was built to address that second question. The vertical view of performance and the horizontal view of alignment are different diagnostics, and they answer different questions. The Pillars tell you how each part of the business is performing. OSCA tells you whether the business, as a whole, is structurally capable of delivering its growth plan, of surviving its integration, or of executing the strategy the board and the investor are working from. The two methodologies are complementary; together they describe both the parts of a business and the operational reality that connects them.
OSCA, in this sense, is what happens when forty years of operational diagnostics meet the missing piece of standard due diligence.
Why OSCA, Why Now
Financial due diligence is mature, well-resourced and broadly trusted. Operational due diligence, the part of the picture that determines whether a growth plan, an acquisition or a leadership transition is actually deliverable, remains under-served. It is conducted unevenly across the industry, often by people without direct operational backgrounds, and the diagnostic frameworks in common use tend to capture activity rather than capability.
After four decades of running these diagnostics by hand inside specific engagements, David built OSCA as a way to apply the same rigour systematically across multiple businesses, multiple scenarios and multiple capital contexts, without losing the texture that makes operational diagnostics genuinely useful. Each OSCA delivers a structural finding that a board, a growth investor or an incoming CEO can act on immediately, with a 30-, 60- and 90-day roadmap.
If you are working through a scenario where the structural questions matter, whether that is a growth plan that needs pressure-testing, a portfolio company that feels harder to read than its financials suggest, an acquisition target whose CIM reads better than its operations would survive, or a leadership transition where execution risk is the central question, the OSCA is built for that conversation.
The next step is a conversation.