Rick Tattersfield
There is no bench. You get me, and I do the work.
Thirty years in equipment and industrial manufacturing operations. Nineteen of them in the Instron group across the UK, Germany and the US — production, then general management, then corporate quality and service. Then GT Solar, from a $60M business to around $1B in four years. An MIT spin-out as COO. A plastics machinery business taken out of chapter 11 and sold. Since 2015, RightTack, working independently — five of those years with a middle-market private equity firm as the principal client.
▸ The origin story: Get to 100 a month — one machine a day to a hundred a month, and through the 2008 cliff intact. Where the methods came from.
Instron was acquired by ITW and I became a fervent practitioner of the 80/20 business simplification toolkit. Earlier, the Royal Navy grounded my approach in Adair’s Action-Centered Leadership framework. It taught me to focus heavily on getting the task done, meaning I maintain a strong bias to action—getting things moving quickly, but ensuring the team and individuals are supported so that momentum is sustainable. This has become my mantra: Act fast. Add simplicity faster.
Every method on this site came out of doing the work. Several came out of doing it wrong the first time. Not all of that work turned into a deal — we did many, many more diligence visits than transactions. Volume like that builds a specific skill: reading an operation fast, on limited access and against a clock, and telling the difference between the problems that are noisy and the one that decides the outcome.
Roles, dates, education and the full record are on LinkedIn. No point in keeping two copies.
Dual US and UK citizen · NSPE member · Providence, Rhode Island. I will sail anything that floats, and some things that seemingly do not.
Right Tack Operational Consulting 