Strategy learned in the boardroom. Proven in the ledger.

From aerospace engineering to growth engineering

Tommy Lie has run strategy at every altitude that matters: member and customer strategy inside a A$100bn superannuation fund, the integration program behind a $20bn bank merger, and service businesses of his own built to $25k–$100k months at roughly 90% margins. Scale Theorem sells the method that survived all three.

The method has an engineering origin. Tommy's university years began in aerospace engineering before he moved to commerce and statistics, and the habit never left: decompose the complex thing to first principles, rebuild it as a system, and measure it until it behaves. He was consulting to a bank board before he graduated — writing a Bendigo Bank community branch's three-year strategy and standing up its first analytics capability — because the pattern holds at any scale.

Strategy you can defend to a board

At Rest — one of Australia's largest industry superannuation funds, serving around two million members — Tommy was responsible for how the fund measured, explained and course-corrected its member strategy. The work was corporate, customer and member strategy in its most accountable form. He built the fund's first commercial model linking brand investment to member outcomes — praised by the Chairman, and used to justify the advertising budget from then on. His analysis connecting share of voice to fund growth underpinned the brand strategy the Board endorsed. And he co-architected the fund's Member Retention Strategy — twelve weeks of analysis, framework-building and stakeholder alignment that became the blueprint for the member business: member attrition fell 38%, and the fund's net-flow position improved 135% year on year.

When the corporate scorecard turned red, he ran the remediation: cross-functional programs that lifted NPS by 12 points inside six months with roughly $3m in revenue benefit, and the fund's first acquisition driver framework, which improved direct member acquisition by 68%. Along the way came the craft that separates a strategy from a plan — the evidence base, the options, the narrative, and the buy-in that makes an organisation actually move.

Then the sharpest test of that craft: a bank merger. In Strategy & Transformation at Qudos Bank, Tommy helped prepare the three-year growth-by-merger corporate strategy, designed the bank's first enterprise-wide planning and prioritisation cycle — consolidating roughly fifty initiatives into a single board-visible portfolio and triaging two hundred–plus operational issues into delivery pathways — and co-established the joint Integration Management Office for the merger with Bank Australia: ten workstreams on a critical path built around regulatory approvals, a member vote and Day-1 readiness. He personally led the governance and ESG workstreams to that critical path, and initiated the customer-experience program that mapped the bank's deposit journey and shipped thirty-plus CX improvements.

Proof without the safety net

From 2023, Tommy took the method into the founder economy. He led the transformation of a membership-based services business doing $16k months at 20–30% margins with in-person delivery: service and customer-experience redesign, a pricing restructure, segmentation-led offers, and AI-based operational automation. The same business now collects $50–100k months at roughly 90% margins, fully online.

In 2024 he co-founded a professional-education business in Singapore and led its strategy and growth end to end. With zero external capital and zero paid media, it was profitable in its first year at ~90% gross margins, reaching US$25k months. The engine behind it was evidence, not volume: 150-plus sales conversations analysed for the drivers of conversion, a sales process rebuilt on the findings that lifted close rates to roughly 1.7 times the industry benchmark, an 84% mid-journey drop-off isolated and reversed until reactivated prospects contributed more than 10% of client revenue, and AI adopted across the whole operating model.

Why Scale Theorem

Scale Theorem exists because the two worlds rarely meet. Founder-led businesses almost never get access to corporate-grade strategy discipline — the diagnostics, the planning cycles, the decision papers, the scoreboard. Corporates rarely move at founder speed. Scale Theorem holds both: corporate, customer and CX strategy practice from superannuation, banking and M&A, fused with growth systems proven live in Tommy's own ventures — packaged as defined deliverables at fixed fees, accepted in writing, and proven on your numbers, not ours.