Benjamin Baume
Strategy to execution
I work across strategy, growth, product, technology and transformation to turn ambitious ideas and difficult problems into practical outcomes.
From helping a local side hustle become a full-time business, to building digital products and AI-enabled systems, to delivering multimillion-dollar enterprise change.
The challenge might start with growth, an inefficient process, a new product idea, a customer problem or an opportunity to use technology differently.
Solving it often requires more than one discipline.
I help connect the thinking with the doing—from understanding the problem and working through the options to designing, building and refining the outcome.
I am comfortable working at the strategic level, but I also like getting close enough to the detail to understand what is really happening.
Because a good idea is only useful if it can become something real.
The work changes depending on the problem. The approach does not. Understand what matters, focus effort where it creates value, and keep moving toward a practical outcome.
Grow
For businesses that need more of the right customers, stronger positioning or a better way to turn interest into action.
That might mean understanding why growth has stalled, improving local visibility, strengthening a digital presence, refining the customer journey or testing what actually drives results.
The answer is rarely “do more marketing”. It is usually about working out what matters most—and improving it consistently.
Build
For businesses with an idea, product, platform, workflow or technology opportunity that needs to move beyond discussion.
I can help work through what should be built, who it is for, how it should work and what is actually required to make it useful.
The objective is not to use technology for the sake of technology. It is to solve the right problem in the right way.
Improve
For organisations dealing with friction, unnecessary complexity, cost, poor customer experience or delivery that is harder than it should be.
Sometimes the right answer is a new system. Sometimes it is a better process. Sometimes it is stopping work that should never have existed in the first place.
How I work
I do not believe every problem needs the same process or the same solution. But the way I approach the work is generally consistent.
What are we actually trying to achieve?
Before deciding what to build, change or invest in, understand the objective, the environment and the real problem.
What do the customer, market, process, technology and evidence tell us?
Go deep enough to understand what matters without turning analysis into a reason not to act.
What should we do? Just as importantly, what should we deliberately not do?
Turn information into direction and focus effort where it has the greatest chance of creating value.
Turn the direction into something tangible.
That might be a customer experience, process, product, system, operating model or combination of them.
Move beyond recommendations.
Help create, implement and connect the pieces required to make the outcome real.
See what happens when people actually use it.
Measure, question, improve and keep removing friction.
Selected work
A selection of work across small business growth, product creation, technology and enterprise transformation.
LuminaSound Productions
LuminaSound Productions needed more than a better-looking website. The opportunity was to create a clearer customer experience while also building the foundations for equipment hire, tailored event planning, availability, quoting, bookings, payments and staff operations.
The work has crossed business requirements, research, customer journeys, visual design, web development, system architecture and operational workflows.
The result is an evolving digital platform designed to make a complex service easier for customers to understand and easier for the business to operate.
View LuminaSound ProductionsGarden Genies
Garden Genies began as a North Shore landscaping side business. My support focused on practical, sustainable growth—strengthening the business's digital presence, improving local search visibility and continually refining how potential customers discovered and engaged with the business.
Over time, the side hustle grew into the business owner's primary occupation. The work was about understanding what a local service business genuinely needed, focusing on the right growth opportunities and improving them consistently.
Craggle & Cromeloan
I co-founded Craggle and helped take the business from idea through fundraising, product development, customer growth and the creation of a broader white-labelled B2B platform.
The work crossed strategy, customer research, regulated financial services, Open Banking, AI, growth, SEO, product design, commercial modelling and technical delivery.
Over a 90-day period, we reduced blended customer acquisition cost by 83% and increased conversion by 130%. We also built sustained organic visibility across more than 50 high-intent search terms.
The platform later evolved into a modular B2B proposition that secured 10 enterprise subscriptions within its first 30 days.
Enterprise transformation
Across senior roles with Westpac and HSBC, I worked on transformation, operating model, customer experience and efficiency challenges across large and complex organisations.
The work ranged from helping create and scale new digital customer channels to redesigning operating models, automating low-value work and advising senior executives on implementation risk and resource allocation.
Selected outcomes included approximately $5 million in annual operating cost reduction, $1.3 million in salary cost reduction through operating model redesign and automation equivalent to 18 FTE of capacity.
The scale was different, but the approach was familiar: Understand the problem. Challenge unnecessary complexity. Focus effort where it creates the greatest value.
Still exploring
Not every idea needs to become a company. Some are opportunities to explore a problem, test an approach or understand a technology more deeply.
Cue
An evolving platform exploring how AI could support parents while preserving therapist authority, strict data boundaries and responsible oversight.
AI voice systems
Work exploring real-time voice interaction, AI workflows, speech services and the architecture required to create useful conversational experiences.
Multi-tenant financial tools
Development of embeddable financial tools and supporting multi-tenant infrastructure designed for use across different businesses, brands and customer environments.
About
My career has taken me from large-scale banking transformation to founding a fintech, building AI-enabled products and helping small businesses grow.
The common thread is that I enjoy complex problems—particularly the ones that sit between traditional disciplines.
Sometimes the challenge is strategic. Sometimes it is commercial, operational, technical or customer-related. Often it is several of those things at once.
I am comfortable working at the strategic level, but I also like getting close enough to the detail to understand what is really happening and help turn a decision into an outcome.
I have been described more than once as a “Swiss Army Knife.” I think that is probably fair.
I learn quickly, ask a lot of questions and tend to be most useful when the path forward is not immediately obvious.
It might be a growth challenge, a new idea, a process that is not working or an opportunity you are not quite sure how to approach.
You do not need to have the answer. Sometimes the most useful place to start is simply understanding the problem properly.