At Growth Hub, we build embedded operational capability for financial services firms.

We remove the operational drag that sits around deals and internal workflows, so operators can focus on high value work.

That includes:

Deal Operations
CRM hygiene, pipeline maintenance, targeting, and deal tracking. Owned, predictable, and run properly.

Research & Intelligence
Structured, factual research that supports decisions without interpretation or noise.

Business Operations Support
Internal operational workflows. Admin, registers, HR and TA operations, vendor data, policy tracking.

Everything is designed upfront, documented through SOPs, QA’d, and rolled out on a clear 30 / 60 / 90 day plan. This behaves like an internal function, not an outsourced task list.

What we do not do is deliberate.
No advice. No insight. No lead generation. No ad hoc support.

We run defined workflows end to end, and we do them well.

Build leverage. Reduce operational drag.

Dan Vanrenen

If you have come across Growth Hub through my posts or conversations, this is the clearest way to understand what we actually do:

We work exclusively with financial services firms.

Growth Hub installs embedded operational capabilities that remove operational drag from deal teams and operators, so they can focus on high value work.

We do this through three clearly defined capabilities.

1. Deal Operations
- CRM hygiene
- pipeline maintenance
- targeting and account lists
- deal trackers and coverage workflows

2. Research & Intelligence
- structured, factual company and sector research
- market and competitor mapping
- transaction data and news monitoring
  (always factual, never interpretive)

3. Business Operations Support
- internal operational workflows and registers
- HR, TA, and people operations admin
- policy, compliance, and vendor data management
- onboarding and offboarding workflows
- document control and internal trackers

Most teams start with Deal Operations.
Once execution is clean, they add Research & Intelligence.
When internal admin drag becomes obvious, they add Business Operations Support.

Everything runs on SOPs, QA, and a clear 30 / 60 / 90 day rollout, so this behaves like a real internal capability, not a collection of tasks.

For clarity, what we do not do:
- lead generation or outreach
- insight, analysis, or advice
- ad hoc “help with whatever” work
- providing individuals rather than a capability

If you are in financial services and spending too much time managing operational noise instead of doing the work that actually moves the needle, this is probably relevant.

Founder & CEO of Growth Hub | Embedded operational capability for financial services firms

Why most teams feel busy but not effective:

If everyone is busy, but nothing feels stable,
you don’t have a capacity problem.

You have an ownership problem.

When no one clearly owns:
- CRM hygiene
- deal tracking
- research inputs
- internal admin

Work floats.
Quality drifts.
People redo the same tasks.
And senior operators end up back in the weeds.

This isn’t a performance issue.
It’s an operating model issue.

Why most “research support” creates more noise, not clarity:

Most teams don’t have a research problem.
They have a decision bottleneck.

What usually happens:
- research is ad hoc
- context lives in inboxes
- facts are mixed with opinions
- people redraw the same work every time

The issue isn’t depth.
It’s structure.

Good research support is:
- factual
- repeatable
- clearly scoped
- delivered in the same format, every time

Clarity beats cleverness.
Especially under time pressure.

The difference between help and leverage:

Help feels good in the moment.
Leverage holds up over time.

Help is:
- someone jumping in
- context living in their head
- progress tied to availability

Leverage is:
- defined workflows
- repeatable outputs
- work that runs without supervision

If your progress depends on who’s online, you’re getting help.
Not leverage.

Most teams come to us saying they want better data.

What they usually need is:
- clearer ownership
- fewer judgment calls
- repeatable workflows
- someone whose job it is to keep things moving

Tools do not create that.
Capabilities do.

This is usually where teams start with us.

When we talk about Deal Operations, this is what we mean.

Not strategy.
Not outreach.
Not analysis.

Just clean execution.

1. CRM hygiene that actually stays clean
2. pipelines updated as a habit, not a scramble
3. targeting lists that are usable, not theoretical
4. trackers that reflect reality

Run properly, this removes hours of low value work from deal teams every week.

Most teams feel the impact within the first 30 days.

Why saying no is part of good operations:

Good operators say no more than they say yes.

Not because they’re difficult.
Because they protect quality.

If everything is in scope:
- nothing is owned properly
- standards slip
- trust erodes

Clear boundaries aren’t restrictive.
They’re how you scale without chaos.

A simple test for deal teams:

If you stopped updating your CRM for two weeks:
- would anyone notice?
- would anything break?
- would decisions change?

If the answer is no, the system is not embedded.
It is optional.

Optional systems always lose to urgent work.

The hidden cost of “we’ll fix it later”
Most operational issues don’t come from big mistakes.

They come from small deferrals.

“We’ll clean that up later.”
“We’ll document it once this deal is done.”
“We’ll tighten the process when things slow down.”

They never do.

Deferred ops work doesn’t disappear.
It compounds.

And by the time it becomes visible, it’s no longer a quick fix.

Most deal teams do not have a CRM problem.

They have an ownership problem.

No one owns:
- hygiene
- consistency
- follow-through
- keeping it current

So the CRM slowly decays.
Pipeline confidence drops.
People stop trusting the data.

And eventually everyone works around it instead.

That is not a tool issue.
It is an operational gap.

Why scaling execution feels harder than scaling revenue:

Revenue scales in jumps.
Execution scales in layers.

Most firms focus on the first and ignore the second.

New deals come in.
New clients, regions, strategies.
But the underlying workflows stay the same.

Eventually the same processes are doing twice the work, under more pressure, with more edge cases.

That’s when execution starts to creak.

Because what got you this far is now becoming a bottleneck.

A quick line we draw early with clients.

We do not “help out” with deals.

We install a Deal Operations capability that:
- owns defined workflows
- runs on SOPs
- is QA checked
- has a clear 30 / 60 / 90 day maturity path

That structure is what makes the work reliable.

Flexibility feels helpful.
Structure is what actually scales.

Why most ops fixes don’t stick:

A lot of operational “fixes” fail for one simple reason.

They’re treated as projects.

A clean-up.
A one-off redesign.
A burst of attention.

Then everyone goes back to normal work.

Operations don’t fail from neglect.
They fail from ambiguity.

The misunderstanding that kills most ops conversations...

The biggest misunderstanding we see is this:

“We need help with workflows.”

What they usually mean is:
“We want someone flexible who can just pick things up.”

Which sounds reasonable.
But it’s also where quality dies.

Good operations are not flexible.
They are designed.

Clear ownership.
Clear scope.
Clear outputs.
Clear 30/60/90 expectations.

If you can’t explain what should exist after 90 days,
you don’t have a workflow.

You have good intentions.

The quiet test of a healthy ops function

Here’s a simple test:
If someone is away for two weeks,
what breaks?

If the answer is:
“we’d struggle”
“they hold a lot of context”
“we’d need to wait for them”

That’s not a people issue.
That’s a design issue.

Strong operations survive holidays,
promotions,
and exits.

That’s the bar.

Here’s a useful question for any growing firm:

“What work do we keep rediscovering how to do?”

If the answer includes:
- how we prep for deals
- how we track progress
- how we gather information
- how we hand things over

That’s not complexity.
That’s missing structure.

Good operations don’t remove work.
They remove rediscovery.

At Growth Hub, we run the operational engine behind financial services teams.
I’m responsible for delivery excellence and client execution across our embedded capability model, making sure the work actually runs cleanly, predictably, and at the standard serious firms expect.

In practice, that means owning how our teams execute day to day across:
- deal operations, including CRM hygiene, pipeline execution, targeting and tracking
- structured research and intelligence that supports faster decision making
- internal operational workflows that keep firms organised as they scale

Most of our clients come to us because execution has quietly become a bottleneck.
CRMs drift. Pipelines lose credibility. Research lives in inboxes. Admin piles up.
Everyone knows it matters, but no one has the time or ownership to run it properly.

My role is to turn that chaos into repeatable workflows, clear ownership, and delivery that holds up under pressure.

We don’t advise.
We don’t do strategy decks.
We don’t “help out where needed”.

We embed teams, run defined workflows end to end, and remove operational drag so deal teams can focus on high value work.

I spend most of my time deep in how firms actually operate, where execution breaks, and what it takes to make operational capability stick long term.

If you care about clean execution, clear boundaries, and delivery that scales without drama, we’ll probably get on well.

Katherine Vanrenen

I spend most of my time inside delivery.

Not in theory.
But in the actual workflows firms rely on every day.

And the pattern I see over and over is this:

Even with the most important operational cornerstones, often it’s no one’s clear responsibility.
- CRM.
- Pipeline.
- Research.
- Trackers.

Everyone touches them.
No one owns them end to end.

That’s usually where things start to quietly break.

Chief Client Officer at Growth Hub | Embedded operational capability for financial services firms

I write about execution problems most firms feel but rarely own.

CRMs, pipelines, research, and operational workflows that quietly decay when no one is responsible for running them end to end.

At Growth Hub, I run delivery and client execution across embedded operational capability for financial services teams.

This is the lens I’ll be writing from here.

When I’m reviewing delivery with clients and something’s messy, I often hear:
“We’ll fix that later.”

In financial services firms that are growing aggressively, later rarely comes.

Deals don’t slow down.
Volumes don’t ease off.
There’s always another transaction, another mandate, another deadline.

No one ever suddenly has time.

And by the time someone circles back, the context is gone, the data has drifted, and the clean-up is far bigger than it needed to be.

Most execution problems I see aren’t caused by bad decisions.
They’re caused by assuming things will calm down.

Spoiler alert: they don’t.

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