Fractional Leaders feat. Dhevesh Mewawalla

Can you please introduce yourself and your journey to becoming a Fractional Leader?

I primarily work with Seed/Series-A companies (~£500k-£5 Mil ARR) struggling to nail Product Market Fit or new market expansion in a Fractional Revenue/Commercial Leader capacity. In my experience, I’m one of the few people in the space that has a background in finance in addition to go-to-market leadership, and think deeply about building sustainable, profitable businesses over pure revenue growth.

Having spent over a decade doing full time leadership roles in banking and impact-focused SaaS businesses, I was very much drawn to early stage organisations and the ability to make systemic, meaningful change. However, the last couple of years in tech has been painful across the ecosystem, largely due to a sub-optimal understanding of unit economics, and the financial implications of over investing their resources without thinking about long-term profitability. The decision to go fractional stemmed from wanting to support more than one business at a time that can set up their revenue engines with Profitable efficient growth (PEG) over Growth at all costs (GAAC), while still being involved as a hands-on operator instead of just giving advice.

Let’s talk impact, what achievements are you proud of the most?

Such a hard thing to put my finger on, because there’s always so much more to do in making this world a better place, and impact is a continuous process. As someone who knows the importance of collaboration & community to drive impact, I carve out dedicated time to support non-profit organisations like Tech4Good South West & One Young World. If I had to narrow it down, I’ll pick two that jump to mind:

Having worked for a Series-A recruitment tech business, really proud of the work we did in creating equal opportunity processes for early stage careers in the UK, Step recruitment being one of the few that embraced our vision to support young people to present who they truly are, instead of being judged on surface level assumptions.

As a GTM leader & manager, supporting a tech-sales account executive (who used to be a car mechanic before joining us) go from a PIP & struggling to settle in to a different industry, to helping him land a marquee deal with Breitling, being recognized as employee of the month, and guiding him on to his dream career in cyber security. Few things are as fulfilling as supporting someone to a path that they’re most passionate about.

Based on your work with start-ups and scale-ups, do you have any pieces of wisdom you could share with businesses in scale-up mode?

I have a few battle scars from my career so far, and the one big takeaway I would share is to understand how you can make a financially sustainable business. Most companies never achieve their TAM & SAM projections, and being able to articulate a clear pathway on how your business becomes a market leader in a really small segment, and then keeps growing into new segments and markets is the key. That really small segment is the ICP, and a razor sharp focus on defining that is the starting point to making capital efficient investments into scaling the company the right way!

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If you are a fractional leader and would like to be featured as part of the “Fractional Leaders” series please get in touch.