25 years in fintech. Most of them carrying a number.
I'm James Dawson. I've spent 25 years in financial technology: senior positions in banks and fintech broking firms, then scaling multiple fintech businesses into many millions of pounds of revenue as CEO and CRO. I've built sales teams from scratch, rebuilt ones that were broken, defended forecasts to boards, and made most of the mistakes I now help clients avoid.
That's the difference between me and most sales advisors. Plenty of people can describe a sales engine. I've been accountable for what they produce: the hiring calls, the missed quarters, the pricing decisions, the deals that died to "no decision" and the systems that stopped that happening. When I sit with a founder or a CEO, I'm not consulting from a framework. I'm pattern-matching from having been in their chair.
In recent years I've brought that experience to fintech scaleups as a fractional CRO, working with companies like BMLL, Finbourne, R3, Carbonplace, Digilytics and Databarracks. The work is always the same underneath: take a sales function that runs on individual brilliance and turn it into an engine that runs on system.
I also own two hospitality businesses, Humble Grape wine bars and Vivat Bacchus restaurants. Hospitality teaches you things fintech never will: margins that punish sloppiness, customers who vote with their feet nightly, and teams you have to lead rather than manage. And it means that when I talk to founders about having your own money on the line, it isn't a figure of speech.
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People don't buy because you're persuasive; they buy because you understand their problem better than they've articulated it themselves, and buying from you is unmistakably in their interest.
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Lead with value, give the frameworks away, and trust that the people worth working with will notice. This page you're reading is built on that bet.
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If the team missed the number, the system failed them, and the system is my job. No engagement of mine ever ends with "the market was tough".
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I turn down engagements where I can't see a credible path to a 10x return on my fee. Losing early is cheap; losing late is what kills scaleups.
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Every engagement is designed so the system, the playbook and the habits stay when I go. Dependency is good business for consultants and bad business for clients, and I know which side of that I want to be on.
What I believe about selling
Why Humble?
Because the best salespeople I've ever worked with are the humblest: curious, honest about what they don't know, and more interested in the buyer's problem than their own pitch. It's also the name over the door of my wine bars, and the same principle runs both businesses: look after people properly and the numbers follow.
The best way to know we’d work well together is to talk
Thirty minutes, no pitch. Worst case, you leave with a decent question you hadn't asked yourself.