Senior commercial, client & professional-services operator
I work where commercial performance, client confidence and operating change meet.
I am most useful when growth, client pressure, operating complexity or new technology makes the next move less obvious, and practical commercial decisions are needed.
Commercial growth & operating leadership
When growth stalls, accelerates or changes shape, the business often has to change with it.
I have led sales and marketing at listed-company scale and co-owned and grown professional-services businesses. I am most useful where revenue, structure, ownership and operating decisions are tangled together and the consequences are real.
Healthcare, pharma & high-trust environments
In healthcare and pharma, regulatory sensitivity, delivery quality and professional accountability shape how the work gets done.
I have built and led specialist agency operations serving multinational organisations including Roche, Sanofi and AstraZeneca. That experience has taught me what credible delivery looks like when trust and commercial performance both matter.
Client & professional-services leadership
Client-service businesses can look healthy while confidence, margin or delivery is starting to fray.
Much of my career has involved winning and growing client relationships, working with senior stakeholders, translating client expectations into workable delivery, and helping teams operate with clearer commercial discipline.
Technology, transformation & adoption
Technology only creates value when the organisation can use it in practice.
My role has often been to translate new capability into workable business practice by aligning stakeholders, redesigning workflows and clarifying where human judgement still matters. That now includes practical AI adoption in agency and professional-services environments.
291-person national sales function
R300m+ annual revenue · JSE-listed business
At Verimark, I progressed from Marketing Manager to Marketing Director then Sales Director and led a national sales function covering national sales, key accounts, franchises, store development, training and regional leadership.
Roche · Sanofi · AstraZeneca
Specialist pharmaceutical communications
I co-founded HiCare and later led Client & Digital Services at XEIOH. We built a specialist pharmaceutical communications operation serving multinational clients, with an approximately eight-person specialist team at peak.
2.8× revenue growth
Approximately R9.2m → R26.2m annual revenue
I joined Zonke as a consultant, became Strategy Director and later an equal 50% co-owner. My responsibilities included strategy, business development, client growth and multi-market delivery during the period in which revenue grew to approximately R26.2m.
25–45%
Estimated reduction in human production time across selected tested workflows
My work has included translating global digital capability into practical local marketing use, and more recently mapping selected medical-content workflows to identify where generative AI could reduce production effort while retaining reference checking, clinical accuracy and final human accountability.
A career built across growth, clients and change
My career began in healthcare sales and brand management, moved through FMCG and listed-company commercial leadership, and then into entrepreneurship, agency ownership and professional-services operations.
The roles have changed. The underlying work has been surprisingly consistent.
Across growth targets, client relationships, new technology and operating-model change, the practical question has usually been the same: what matters here, and how do we make it work?
That is the common thread in my career.
Making commercially important change usable. Understanding what matters, aligning people around it and turning it into action.
Technology changes.
The operating question remains.
AI is changing how work is produced, how clients judge value and how organisations think about productivity and operating models.
I am interested in that change from an operator's perspective. The useful question is not simply what the technology can do, but what the organisation can actually use.
- Where does it genuinely improve the work? 1.
- What still requires human judgement? 2.
- What changes commercially when the work becomes faster? 3.
- What does the organisation need to change for adoption to work in practice? 4.
My recent work through Brains Before Bots has explored these questions in agencies and professional-services environments, where the commercial and operating implications of AI adoption are already practical rather than theoretical.
AI is part of the environment I work in. It is not a substitute for commercial judgement.
I am a commercially minded operator who tends to be most useful when the situation is not yet tidy.
Usually there is a real problem underneath the presenting one: commercial pressure, a client relationship under strain, or an operating model that no longer fits what the business needs.
I like finding that underlying question, creating enough structure for better decisions, and staying useful through the messiness of getting things done.
I have worked across corporate, entrepreneurial, agency, healthcare and transformation settings. That breadth gives me a useful vantage point when the problem does not fit neatly into one function or label.
Based in Hampshire, United Kingdom.
A conversation is usually the best place to start
If something here connects with a commercial, client, operating or transformation challenge you are working through, I am always interested in a worthwhile conversation.
© 2026 Michael MacDonald. All rights reserved.