Liam Corcoran is the founder of ClarityOS, a UK-based advisory practice. He works with CEOs and founders of established B2B businesses, typically £1m–£20m revenue, where growth has made the business harder to run, across the UK, Europe and the Middle East.
Before advising CEOs, I spent my career building, scaling and operating businesses.
I've founded and sold a company, built new revenue streams inside larger organisations, opened markets internationally, led commercial teams and worked across technology, data, product, customers and execution.
That experience shaped how I look at businesses today.
I rarely see a sales problem as just a sales problem, a people problem as just a people problem or an operational problem as just an operational problem.
Businesses are systems. The interesting part is understanding how the pieces affect each other.
How I look at a business
- See the whole business.
- Use evidence and conversations to identify what's actually happening.
- Prioritise the few constraints that matter.
- Bring the right people together.
- Make decisions.
- Turn them into action.
Where the thinking comes from
When I built Q Research, we became better at selling before we became good at building the organisation behind the sales. I don't regret that. Revenue mattered, customers mattered and getting the work delivered mattered.
But I learned what happens when temporary workarounds become the way the company operates. That's what I now call organisational debt. The shortcuts were sensible at the time. What I missed was the point at which they had become permanent.
Later, inside much larger international businesses, I saw the same problem at a different scale. Capability has to move beyond individuals if growth is going to hold.
Career
ClarityOS
Founder.
Workiro
Interim revenue leader, USA and EMEA, during the move from on-premise software to SaaS. Restructured account management and delivered the business's first quarterly revenue target since the SaaS launch.
ByteDance / BytePlus
CRO and General Manager, EMEA. Full P&L responsibility across sales, sales engineering, partnerships, customer success, marketing, strategy and go-to-market, with teams in London and Dubai. Built ByteDance's enterprise technology business across EMEA to eight-figure revenue.
Dynata
Global VP Commercial. Scaled the commercial division to eight-figure revenue, led teams of up to 80 and led the commercial integration after the DMA-Institute and iPinion acquisitions.
Nielsen Audio (formerly Arbitron)
Head of Sales EMEA. Took Zokem's cross-device audience measurement to market through its acquisition by Arbitron and then Nielsen.
Q Research
Co-founder and Managing Director. Co-founded with Liz Nelson, founder of TNS. Built the business and sold it to Fly Research.
Governance and advisory
- IMPRESS, the UK press regulator. Independent member of the Finance & Audit Committee, since 2024.
- I-COM Global. UK Advisory Board member, 2019 to 2023, including its Attribution Council and judging the Global Data Creativity Awards.
Education
- BA (Hons) Marketing and Business, University of Greenwich
- Leading and Managing Globally, Yale School of Management
- CRO School, Pavilion
How I work with CEOs
Most work starts with a conversation and, where there's something worth investigating, a Capability Review. Some CEOs take the findings forward themselves. Others ask me to stay alongside them and their leadership team as a CEO Operating Partner.
Writing
I write about why growing businesses become harder to run, and what to do about it.
Discuss your business
Thirty minutes on what's changed, what's becoming harder and where I'd start looking.