Decisions made, decisions owned.
Chief Operating Officer of AmeriPro Health. CEO of two Falck business units, both turned from loss to profit. VP of Operations over $150M in revenue, ten business units, eleven states and 1,600 employees.
Most of my operating career has been inside private-equity-backed or foundation-owned companies, so I know the cadence a sponsor expects. I started at Accenture and Oliver Wyman, and I still read a business the way an investor does.
Adam Koontz
Founder & Principal
Atlanta, Georgia
- My work sits where strategy meets execution: what the business should do, what it costs to get there, and the operating rhythm that makes it happen. I go as far into the numbers as the decision needs, which is how I find that two markets have been counting the same metric differently all year. Every comparison between them was wrong.
- The businesses have all been service operations that run on people and assets: ferry and logistics networks, industrial catering, emergency medical services and healthcare delivery, payments, medical devices. Different industries, the same shape. Profit is made one location, one contract, one crew at a time.
- I take the operating seat or work alongside it, on bounded initiatives with a clear deliverable and a date. I am direct in that mode. If I think the plan is wrong I will say so early, in the room, while it is still cheap to change.
What I get called in for
Largely the same short list of situations, whatever the industry.
A unit is losing money and there is a clock on it.
As CEO of Falck Northern California, one of the group's US business units, EBITDA went from −$3.6M to +$1.4M in fourteen months: the organization restructured for accountability, the leadership team rebuilt, and the loss-making non-emergency line closed.
Then as CEO of Falck Florida, −$600K a month to +$65K in six months: unprofitable lines closed and long-term contract extensions secured. Unit was subsequently sold.
Nobody can say which parts of the portfolio are worth keeping.
A grow-or-go review across the same group's ten business units in eleven states, covering $150M in revenue and 1,600 employees. Five were divested, adding $5.6M a year in EBITDA, and 95% of the affected employees were placed.
The same logic works one level down, market by market inside a single business.
Growth is outrunning the ability to see it.
As Chief Operating Officer of AmeriPro Health, transport volume grew 27%, revenue 28%, and eleven new markets and service lines opened in fourteen months, including entry into a new state.
Expansion at that pace hides things, so I set one KPI language across every market: unit hours, trips, utilization, cost per unit hour, revenue per unit hour. I also rebuilt field labor in one state, raising base wages to close a staffing gap and taking overtime down with it.
Two organizations have to become one.
At DFDS, post-merger integration of a €400M cross-border acquisition, delivered ahead of deadline: the integration office stood up, the combined organization designed, and the synergies actually banked.
The plan is agreed and nobody can tell if it is working.
At DFDS, a 6,600-person group operating across twenty countries, I ran the annual and five-year planning process and built the balanced scorecards the plan was managed against.
I also launched the group's customer experience and employee engagement programs, anchored across thirty offices.
One language, every market, one screen.
The target overtime column reads 60% on one kind of market and 15.8% on another, because that is what each schedule structurally produces before anyone works an extra shift. Judging both against one number would call the wrong market the problem. The column beside it is the only part anyone can act on.
Three rows are tagged as coverage contracts and their utilization targets read as not applicable, because a market staffed to a response obligation cannot be judged on throughput. Deciding what a metric does not apply to is most of what makes a scorecard usable.
Scroll the figure sideways to read it.
Companies and credentials
- AKOS International
- Founder & Principal
- AmeriPro Health
- Chief Operating Officer
- 3Shape
- Senior Director, Head of Sales, North America
- Falck
- VP Operations & Regional Managing Director; CEO, Falck Northern California; CEO, Falck Florida
- Elavon
- Senior Vice President, Global Customer Experience (U.S. Bank)
- DFDS
- Vice President, Group Strategy & Corporate Development, Copenhagen
- Gate Gourmet
- Vice President, Marketing & Business Development
- Oliver Wyman · Accenture
- Senior Associate; Senior Consultant
- MBA
- Management & Strategy, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
- BE
- Electrical Engineering, Vanderbilt University