Richard Muscat Azzopardi

I’ve spent the last twenty years building businesses and helping other people build theirs. Most of that help now goes one way: getting specialised B2B companies out of the trap of being chosen on price. The word I use for it is decommoditisation, and I do most of it in manufacturing and technology. In practice it’s three jobs: I’m the CEO of Switch, a B2B brand and marketing consultancy I run with my brother Ed; I chair a Vistage group of business leaders; and I work with a small number of US and UK companies as a strategy consultant and fractional CMO. Along the way I picked up an executive education at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, which still shapes how I think about strategy.

The thread running through all of it is a simple belief: growth and kindness are not a trade-off. The best businesses I’ve worked with grow because of how they treat their people and the world around them, not in spite of it. One of my goals in life is to prove that, repeatedly.

Two things tend to keep clients around longer than any deliverable. I don’t leave a problem until it moves, and I bring my address book with me: twenty years of building businesses has filled it with Vistage members and chairs, the independent agencies of ICOM’s worldwide network, and the CFOs I coach across the US. Part of the job, as I see it, is knowing who to call.

I write about marketing, strategy, and what it actually takes to run a good business over in Writing. If you’d like to get in touch, here’s how.