Strategic Operator

The Missing Owner

I work across product, commercial, partnerships, technology and operations — building the context, alignment and ownership needed to fix complex situations and take new or stalled opportunities from concept to reality. 19+ years building and scaling technology-enabled products, platforms and businesses, with 13 years going deep into POS-integrated loyalty and commerce ecosystems at enterprise scale.

Strategic Fixer Loyalty Specialist

Where I Help

Two ways this experience gets put to work.

One is broad: stepping in as a Strategic Fixer when something's urgent, ambiguous or unowned. The other is deep: thirteen years of specialist experience in loyalty, rewards and commerce infrastructure.

For businesses with an urgent, ambiguous or ownerless problem that crosses product, commercial, technology and operational lines — someone needs to step in and run it, now.

Special-situations & interim ownership

Stepping into a sudden leadership gap, platform transition or operational crisis — experienced ownership immediately, for a defined period, without the delay of a permanent hire.

Cross-functional strategic initiatives

Bringing clarity and ownership to opportunities that matter, involve several functions, and don't yet have a natural senior owner.

Operating partnerships

For select technology businesses, working alongside the founder or leadership team as an operating partner — commercial execution, partnerships and systems thinking, applied directly.

Strategic Fixer, in practice

What this looks like

A CEO or COO resigns without warning and the business needs steady hands immediately
A cross-functional initiative has stalled because no one actually owns it
A platform or shareholder transition is underway and needs experienced hands holding continuity
A founder needs an operating partner, not another consultant
A new product concept needs testing and a go-to-market path before real investment follows
An idea needs wireframing and a technical MVP or proof of concept before it can be pitched or funded

Thirteen years spent designing, building and running a POS-integrated loyalty, rewards and gift-card platform — working closely with retailers, hospitality groups and POS providers across multiple markets, including Starbucks, KAUAI, Bootlegger and Gloria Jean's, and integration partnerships spanning Oracle MICROS Symphony, GAAP Hospitality, Pilot, Elite, ESP, DigiTot, Sage, IQ Retail/Klipboard and BCX (Vodacom).

For retailers & hospitality businesses

Assessing existing loyalty programmes and technology ecosystems
Defining requirements, running RFPs, and selecting or implementing loyalty platforms
Improving the internal operating model around loyalty — roles, responsibilities, process and team capability
Mentoring existing teams
Fractional strategic ownership of the loyalty function, where a full-time senior hire isn't the right move yet

For loyalty, POS & payment platform providers

Assessing an existing loyalty / value-added-services proposition
Identifying gaps and opportunities across product, integrations and APIs
Partner ecosystem and go-to-market strategy
Determining how a broader VAS marketplace could evolve

Fractional Loyalty and Merchant Success Lead, in practice

The Missing Owner

Most loyalty programmes don't underperform because the technology fails. The platform usually works, and the provider usually delivers. What quietly erodes commercial performance is that ownership of the outcome is split across marketing, operations, IT, finance, the loyalty provider and outside agencies — everyone owns a piece, and no one owns the result.

The Missing Owner is a continuous, merchant-side executive function that closes that gap — connecting strategy to execution across the provider, the operations team and the customer, so the programme's commercial performance has a single accountable owner again. It's delivered as a fractional engagement, right-sized to the business, not a full-time hire.

Start with an Executive Discovery Workshop

How I Work

I don't arrive with a preconceived answer.

The same operating model applies whether the problem is a stalled cross-functional initiative or an underperforming loyalty ecosystem.

Immerse

Get inside the business before proposing anything — the people, the systems, the history of what's already been tried.

What you get: An accurate, unfiltered read on the business — not a version filtered through the org chart or the existing narrative.

Understand

Map how the parts actually interact, not how the org chart says they should.

What you get: A clear picture of where the real friction is, not just where it's assumed to be.

Connect

Bring together the people, systems and information that aren't currently talking to each other.

What you get: Alignment across functions that were previously working in isolation.

Identify leverage

Find the small number of places where a well-placed intervention changes the whole picture.

What you get: A short, prioritised view of where to act — not a 40-page audit.

Orchestrate

Take ownership of moving it forward — not just recommending it and stepping away.

What you get: Someone accountable for the outcome, not just the plan.

Improve

Leave the business with stronger capability than it had before, not a new dependency on me.

What you get: A team and a system that can run without me.

Case Studies

Nearly two decades of building and running platforms.

SaaS Product Leadership

Owning SaaS Products From Wireframe to Platform Evolution

I co-founded two technology businesses, Vidamo (2008–2013) and Swarm Rewards (2013–2026), and owned the product side of both — from early mobile and SMS engagement tools to POS-integrated loyalty infrastructure running in live hospitality and retail businesses.

Context

The Complexity

The people using these products were cashiers, store managers and marketing teams, not product specialists. Every decision had to balance usability at the till, technical feasibility, integration realities and what the business could sustain commercially. As the platforms grew, the challenge shifted from one-off, customer-specific builds towards something more reusable, without disrupting the customers already relying on them.

My Role

At Vidamo I drove product ideation, wireframing and feature design across several SaaS and mobile products, managed the development teams, platform partners and third-party providers who built them, and oversaw each product through testing, QA, deployment and optimisation. I also led go-to-market: sales, onboarding and client relationships. At Swarm I led product ownership across successive platform generations and coordinated the migration and redevelopment work between them. I contributed to the move from bespoke, customer-by-customer builds towards reusable, configuration-driven infrastructure.

What Changed

Products went from concept to live commercial use across several industries: mobile surveys, messaging, vouchers and engagement tools at Vidamo, then loyalty, rewards and digital voucher capability at Swarm, with WhatsApp commerce and digital gift cards added over time. Early POS-linked voucher work at Vidamo informed the loyalty platform that followed.

What This Demonstrates

Owning a product end to end means turning messy operational requirements into something people can actually use, working through the teams that build it, and keeping it commercially sustainable as it evolves. That applies equally to a new SaaS build, a product strategy question, or an existing platform that has outgrown its original design.

Platform Transition & Customer Continuity

Keeping an Enterprise Platform Alive Through Reinvention

Swarm Rewards, the POS-integrated loyalty and rewards platform I co-founded, went through several years where the business itself was in flux — shareholder transitions, recapitalisation and a full platform rebuild — while customers kept running live, mission-critical loyalty programmes on top of it.

Context

The Complexity

The platform’s enterprise customers, a base that included Starbucks, KAUAI and Bootlegger, needed their programmes to keep running as they always had. Behind the scenes, ownership was changing, new investment was being negotiated and core infrastructure was being rebuilt. Any one of those is hard on its own. Together, they left little room for the usual trade-off of slowing delivery while the business side got sorted out.

My Role

I was closely involved across all of it. I led stakeholder communication through the transitions, negotiated and managed the shareholder processes, and coordinated the platform migration and redevelopment work. Week to week, that meant deciding which functionality customers depended on most and what could wait, while staying in direct contact with customers and integration partners so that changes behind the scenes didn’t surface as disruption in front of them. It also meant making sure no single part of the business — finance, product, customer success — solved its own problem in a way that created one for another.

What Changed

The platform was rebuilt and migrated over this period, the shareholder and investment changes were worked through, and customers’ live programmes stayed in operation throughout. Relationships with enterprise customers and integration partners were actively maintained, and the priority throughout was that customers experienced continuity rather than the change underneath it.

What This Demonstrates

Outcomes like this rarely come from any one fix. They come from someone holding the whole picture — commercial, technical and relational — while everyone else is necessarily focused on their own piece of it. That is the role I’m most useful in when a business is changing underneath a live product.

Enterprise Integrations

Turning POS Integrations Into a Scalable Growth Channel

Swarm’s loyalty and rewards products only worked if they ran inside the point-of-sale systems merchants already used. Over time Swarm built integrations with regional and international POS and commerce platforms, including Oracle MICROS Symphony, GAAP Hospitality, Pilot Software, Elite POS UK, ESP, DigiTot, IQ Retail/Klipboard, Sage and BCX.

Context

The Complexity

Every POS ecosystem had its own APIs, commercial model, cashier journey, payment flow, redemption behaviour and reporting. A working API connection wasn’t enough: a redemption had to be accurate and simple for a cashier in a live restaurant or store. Larger customers ran several third-party systems side by side, and many partner relationships took years to mature — some discussions ran for more than a decade before an integration became commercially viable.

My Role

I established and managed the integration partnerships and led integration expansion across hospitality and retail platforms. That meant working with each provider’s team on scope, commercial terms, testing and rollout, structuring revenue-share and channel arrangements, and coordinating test scenarios against real transaction conditions before anything went live. In larger multi-system customer environments, including Starbucks, Swarm acted as the interoperability layer between systems, and I coordinated deployment sequencing and the stakeholders involved. That experience shaped my view that integrations should be reusable, configurable infrastructure rather than rebuilt for each customer, and I contributed to moving Swarm in that direction.

What Changed

Swarm built integration relationships across multiple regional and international POS and commerce platforms, giving the product a route into merchants through the systems they already ran. Integrations became a distribution channel as well as a technical feature, opening up customer acquisition opportunities through partners as well as through direct sales.

What This Demonstrates

Integration work is as much about partner alignment, commercial terms and operational testing as it is about APIs. It matters wherever a product has to connect to systems it doesn’t control: POS and payment platforms, partner ecosystems, or enterprise environments with many moving parts.

Business Continuity & Recapitalisation

Holding a Business Together Through Restructuring and Recapitalisation

Swarm Rewards was a founder-led platform business. Over its life it moved through several phases of shareholder restructuring, recapitalisation, platform redevelopment and strategic repositioning — periods in which funding, ownership, product direction and day-to-day operations all depended on each other.

Early-Stage SaaS Commercialisation

Building and Commercialising SaaS Products Ahead of Market Adoption

In 2008 I co-founded Vidamo to build mobile and SaaS products — SMS and mobile-web engagement, mobile vouchers, QR and barcode redemption, surveys, customer profiling and CRM-linked workflows — years before mobile loyalty and digital engagement became mainstream business priorities.

Loyalty & Transactional Commerce

Building Loyalty Infrastructure That Works in Live Hospitality and Retail

Swarm’s loyalty, rewards and digital voucher products ran inside live hospitality and retail businesses, from coffee shops and restaurants to retail brands and franchise groups. In much of the market, loyalty at the time was fragmented or promotion-led, with limited connection to the transaction itself.

Context

The Complexity

Loyalty at the till isn’t a marketing problem. It has to fit inside POS workflows, cashier habits, redemption flows, franchise structures and reporting, with seconds per transaction and staff who can’t be expected to learn something complicated. Merchants varied widely in size and technical maturity, and any disruption at the till showed up immediately as a customer experience and merchant confidence problem.

My Role

I led product ownership of the loyalty, rewards and voucher products, and contributed to the rollout and expansion of rewards, WhatsApp commerce and digital gift card initiatives. My focus was keeping operational simplicity intact as capability grew: the cashier journey, redemption behaviour and merchant onboarding had to stay straightforward while the platform did more. I worked with merchants and POS partners on onboarding and rollout, and helped shape commercial models around recurring participation and transaction-linked engagement rather than one-off promotions.

What Changed

The platform grew from points and rewards into a broader engagement ecosystem covering digital vouchers, mobile engagement, WhatsApp commerce and gift cards, used by merchants including Starbucks, KAUAI, Bootlegger and Gloria Jean’s. It was built around the transaction and the merchant’s existing operations, rather than as a separate promotional tool.

What This Demonstrates

Loyalty programmes succeed or fail on operational detail: what a cashier does, what a customer experiences, and who owns the result. That is the lens I bring to loyalty strategy, platform and vendor selection, and programme design for retailers, restaurant groups and the providers who serve them.

Brands

POS & Platform Partnerships

How We'd Work

Different depths of involvement, the same underlying commitment.

Whichever silo applies, the shape of engagement is consistent — from an outside perspective through to meaningful, ongoing ownership.

Strategic Advisory

Experienced outside perspective for founders and leadership teams pressure-testing a decision or an unclear opportunity.

Defined Strategic Projects

A contained problem with a concrete output — assess, understand, recommend, roadmap. Often the simplest place to start.

Fractional Strategic Ownership

Meaningful responsibility for an important initiative over a defined period — building capability the business keeps, rather than depends on me for.

Operating Partnerships

For select opportunities, deeper involvement alongside strong technology or product capability that needs experienced commercial ownership.

A genuinely exceptional executive, co-founder or long-cycle operating role remains of interest where there's unusually strong alignment — though it isn't the primary focus of these conversations.

About

Nineteen years at the intersection of product, partnerships and commerce.

I'm a South African strategic operator with 19+ years across mobile technology, SaaS, commerce infrastructure, loyalty and rewards, and platform partnerships. My work has never sat neatly inside one function — it consistently lives where commercial, technical and operational complexity meet.

That's meant founder-led product building, enterprise integrations, platform migrations under real constraint, shareholder transitions, and long-cycle partnerships that sometimes took a decade to mature. The common thread isn't any one title — it's getting inside ambiguity, understanding how a system actually works, and helping turn it into something that runs.

2008 – 2013 (5 years)

Vidamo

Co-founder. Early mobile engagement and SaaS products, concept to commercial rollout, across multiple industries.

2013 – 2026 (13 years)

Swarm Rewards

Co-founder. Product, partnerships and platform expansion for a POS-integrated loyalty and commerce platform, at enterprise scale.

2026 – present

Vlaming.io

Selective strategic advisory, fractional ownership and operating-partner engagements across platforms, product and loyalty ecosystems.

Get in touch

Have an important opportunity or problem that crosses functions — or a loyalty ecosystem that needs one accountable owner?

Tell me briefly what's going on. I respond personally to every message.

I take on a small number of engagements at a time, by design — fractional and special-situations work only creates value if there's enough capacity to stay properly inside the problem. If timing matters on your side, it's worth starting the conversation before the gap starts costing more than it needs to.

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