The Growth Chair. Weekly.
Board-facing commentary on growth-stage SaaS, life sciences, digital health and AI. Written by Andrew Wyatt. Read here. Delivered by Substack email. Distributed on LinkedIn.
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The Growth Chair newsletter, delivered inside LinkedIn every week.
Follow on LinkedInField guides.
Long-form, evergreen pieces sized for the board reader. Written once, kept live.
Partner-led growth
The commercial architecture that compounds revenue when direct sales stops scaling. Written for CEOs and CROs of growth-stage B2B SaaS.
Field guide · LiveAI and the Board
The nine questions a board should ask about AI every quarter, how to fund new AI revenue, and what the public record shows. Written for chairs, NEDs and investors.
Field guide · LiveFractional Chief Growth Officer
A practical guide to the role for PE-backed B2B SaaS boards. When to hire one, when not to, how to measure the seat, what the engagement actually looks like.
Field guide · LiveNon-executive director
What operating experience brings to the board table that observer commentary cannot. Written for Chairs and PE partners scoping the seat.
The archive.
Every essay from The Growth Chair. Latest first. Read them here, or on Substack.
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5 OCT 2026
Scaling is what you do. Scale-readiness is what you are.
The board asks “are we ready to scale?” and the answer that comes back is a plan. That is the wrong answer to the wrong question. Scaling is a forward motion. Scale-readiness is a state. The plan describes what you are about to do. The state describes what…
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28 SEP 2026
Your partner programme is not a portfolio. It is an architecture.
Most partner programmes are four programmes pretending to be one. Different economics. Different enablement. Different deal cycles. Different reporting lines. Different KPIs. Different problem when something breaks. The board pack does not show any of this.…
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21 SEP 2026
Ask for proof, not policy
Every board tracks revenue. Far fewer track the domains that surface late and cost most.
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18 SEP 2026
One investor scared our buyers. The other silenced our sceptics.
Apertio had a potential acquirer and a strategic customer on the same cap table. They sent opposite signals. Both lessons still apply.
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14 SEP 2026
Consistency beats polish. Speed is a signal.
Diligence is not one document review. It is a series of readings the buyer compares.
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7 SEP 2026
A buyer pays for confidence, not revenue
Diligence is where confidence is won or lost. Score your company on the nine domains that decide it, before a buyer does.
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31 AUG 2026
Ten questions for the chair once the risk map exists
The picture is not the answer. It changes what to ask.
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24 AUG 2026
Which 63% actually said the words AI?
The board papers tell you who is really in the AI conversation. And who is not yet.
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24 AUG 2026
The buyer side of health
Every ecosystem map shows who can help a founder. None shows who pays. In health that is the harder question, and getting it wrong is why good products die in pilots.
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17 AUG 2026
949 scored cells. Here's how the Radar was built.
Every score has a page reference. That is the whole point.
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10 AUG 2026
The NHS Board Radar is live
Every English health system, scored on the nine national priorities, from their own board papers. Free, no email, no form.
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3 AUG 2026
Quarterly Review or Theatre.
The discipline that makes the colour real.
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28 JUL 2026
AI Readiness Is a Workflow-by-Workflow Question
The right answer is never one colour for the whole company.
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20 JUL 2026
The IT Stack Nobody Audits
The map you cannot produce on demand is the map you do not have.
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13 JUL 2026
Top of Licence, Not Top of Org Chart
The under-priced lever in every scale-up board pack.
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7 JUL 2026
The Efficiency Trap
Everyone is buying AI. Almost nobody is making new money from it.
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6 JUL 2026
Scaling is the easy bit. The hard bit is finding out you weren't ready.
Five questions a growth-stage CEO should be able to answer before adding anything on top.
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22 JUN 2026
Most partner programmes are four programmes pretending to be one.
The conflation that kills more partner revenue than the economics ever do.
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8 JUN 2026
The Risk Map Nobody Asks For
The conversation about leadership your board doesn't know how to start.
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27 MAY 2026
AI deployment starts with the operating model, not the language model.
The target operating model just became the most valuable asset on your shelf.
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26 MAY 2026
Ortent
Commercial authority for growth-stage SaaS in Life Sciences, Digital Health and AI.
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29 APR 2026
Don't Build the LLM. Integrate the Components.
The architecture that survives audit.
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28 APR 2026
Don't Hire Yourself
The hire that would fail a 'beer with this person' test is usually the one that changes the company.
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24 APR 2026
World-class healthtech, dead on arrival
Why the real barrier to healthtech adoption is not regulation. It is change management.
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24 APR 2026
The Founder's Achilles Heel
Why the instinct that launches a company is often the one that keeps it from scaling.
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23 APR 2026
You Can't Sell a Platform
What Lotus, Apertio, Intuwave and Lumeon taught me about winning markets.
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23 APR 2026
Run the Company, Not the Sale
What four exits taught me about the companies that actually get bought.
Clarity when it counts.
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