About the author
The short version, because this is a book site.
I spent over three decades building, fixing and exiting businesses before I wrote any of this down.
I came up through operations. I built and exited my first company through a leveraged buyout, and that experience is what got me a seat as a founding financial partner in a private equity and venture capital firm, as the youngest on the partner team. I learned the financial ropes there while working hands-on with portfolio companies, in the room with leadership teams, driving the clarity and execution that lifted enterprise value.
That background became my edge.
Not the finance.
The operating.
After that exit I went deep into the work with leaders inside companies, from lean startups to multi-million-dollar enterprises. Different businesses, different industries, the same frustration every time. They didn't need another framework. They needed focus, leverage and real traction.
My late mentor told me to write down the systems I was using in the field. That was more than thirty years ago. I didn't do it, because I didn't feel I had earned the right to.
Years later it was clients doing the pushing. "Put this in a book." Not for inspiration. For access, so that more leaders could use the work even if they never hired me.
The 20% Leader is that answer. It's lean, it's punchy, and it's only the part that actually drives execution.
I run Manolutions, a business optimisation firm, and I am the architect of Total QX™, the performance framework that fuses leadership alignment, execution rhythm and clarity-led transformation. It is the engine behind the training and advisory work, and it's the thinking underneath this book.
When I am not doing that, I am on a bike, in the kitchen, or in Transcendental Meditation. My Hedonist Entrepreneur philosophy holds that success should be both wildly profitable and deeply satisfying, and I have never seen a good reason to choose.
The full story, the writing, and the rest of the work live at paullange.com.au.
