The business of deciding what should come next

Vitality Guru is a Business Reporter client

On 7 July 2010 Remy Blumenfeld opened The Hollywood Reporter and saw the news in print. He was leaving as director of formats at ITV Studios. A new chief executive, Adam Crozier, wanted a different team. Blumenfeld had been told the day before. Seeing it reported was something else.

“I wasn’t worried about money first,” he says. “I was worried about identity.”

Sixteen years later, identity is still the part of a career decision that interests him most. Through his coaching and advisory practice Vitality.Guru, Blumenfeld works with founders, executives and senior professionals across sectors including banking, property development, luxury goods, technology, advertising and television.

The industries may be different, but the problems are often remarkably similar. A market changes. A business model that worked for years becomes less reliable. New technology alters what customers expect. An established career stops producing the opportunities it once did. Someone who has spent 20 years becoming very good at one thing has to decide how much of that experience still has value, and what needs to change.

“The question I keep coming back to is very simple,” Blumenfeld says. “What problem does the market have now, and is what you are offering actually solving it?”

His clients are often successful by conventional measures. They may be earning well, running profitable businesses or being offered the next promotion. The difficulty is deciding whether the next move is also the right one.

“Success can actually make these decisions harder,” he says. “The market keeps rewarding you for what you’ve already proved you can do, even when you’re starting to wonder whether you want to keep doing it.”

An executive can see an industry changing and still be rewarded for staying in it. A founder can have customers, staff and a respectable profit while wondering whether the business model beneath them is ageing faster than they are. A senior professional can remain highly employable even as the market starts placing less value on the expertise around which they built their reputation.

The questions brought to Blumenfeld therefore tend to sound commercial. Should I take the job? Start the company? Keep the company? Change markets? Sell? Stay? Underneath them are less tidy questions about status, fear and identity.

“People with long careers have accumulated more than experience,” he says. “They have accumulated persuasive arguments.”

Building, selling and starting again

Blumenfeld knows something about those arguments. In 1991 he co-founded Brighter Pictures with Gavin Hay, without outside investment, and spent a decade building it into one of the UK’s better-known independent production companies, later acquired by Endemol in 2001. He stayed on in a senior creative role, later co-founded Brighter Public Relations, founded and sold another production business, Amaze TV, and in 2008 joined ITV Studios to build a central development operation and a global formats team.

Then the management changed and he was out.

He had started companies before and knew, at least intellectually, that a career could survive a rupture. That did not stop him spending weeks finding reasons not to open his laptop.

What interests him now is less the sector in which somebody works than the moment they have reached. A founder may need to rethink the proposition on which a company has been built. An executive may need to translate expertise developed in one market into value in another. Someone whose reputation once opened doors may discover that the market is now asking different questions.

This is one reason Blumenfeld’s work sits somewhere between coaching, commercial strategy and decision-making. A client may arrive talking about confidence and leave needing to test a new proposition. Another may arrive convinced they need a new career and discover that the more useful move is to renegotiate the one they already have.

“I’m usually trying to separate three things,” Blumenfeld says. “What are you good at? What does the market value? And what do you actually want next? Successful people get surprisingly good at confusing those things.”

Those questions sound simple until money, reputation and other people’s expectations are attached to the answers.

“You’ve spent 20 minutes telling me who you were”

Senior people can talk fluently about what they have done. They are often less clear about what somebody should pay them for now.

A long career produces credentials, titles, achievements and expertise. None of those, on their own, constitutes a proposition. The commercial task is to translate them into a problem somebody needs solved.

A producer may list programme credits when a buyer is really paying for judgement under pressure and the ability to deliver complicated work on time. An executive may talk about years spent overseas when the valuable part is that they have already made the expensive mistakes involved in entering a new market.

After a long account of a career, Blumenfeld will sometimes interrupt: “You’ve spent 20 minutes telling me who you were. Tell me why tomorrow’s buyer should care.”

That is not always a comfortable conversation.

“Experience only becomes commercially valuable when you can translate it into somebody else’s problem,” he says. “A list of things you’ve done is not the same as an argument for why somebody should hire you now.”

Jonathon Hancock came to him while working as a senior television producer on shows including Strictly Come Dancing and The Apprentice. He had a young family, a steady flow of freelance work and an idea for a company. Each new contract was rational to accept. Each one also postponed the business he said he wanted to build.

“When I first started working with Remy, I was full of self-doubt about leaving the comfort of established production studios,” Hancock later wrote. “I had a vision for my own company, but the idea of launching it in the midst of industry challenges felt overwhelming.”

In 2024 Hancock launched Reel Scenes Media, a Brixton-based production company making factual entertainment for broadcasters and brands. The important point, Blumenfeld argues, is not that leaving was braver than staying. It was that the two choices were building different futures.

Matt Ramsden described a different version of the same problem. After years as a producer of short-form and factual work, he knew he wanted to work differently but had not yet decided that this meant building a company.

“When I started working with Remy I was trapped in a freelancer cycle that had stopped serving my objectives,” he wrote.

With his business partner Peter Campion, Ramsden launched IndyStudios, which makes branded and owned content. An early commission was a remembrance film for the Royal British Legion, presented by Royal Marine veteran JJ Chalmers.

The examples happen to come from television, an industry Blumenfeld knows well, but the underlying problem is not specific to television. It is what happens when the market moves faster than the identity, proposition or business model that once created success.

Sometimes the advice is to stay

The coaching industry is not short of people selling reinvention. Blumenfeld is wary of treating movement itself as progress.

“I’m not interested in persuading somebody to change for the sake of changing,” he says. “Sometimes the best decision is to stay. The question is whether you are staying because it still serves you, or because everything you’ve built makes leaving difficult.”

A founder may have spent years building trust, distribution or a customer base that would be expensive to recreate. An executive may not need a new employer so much as a different brief. A business may not need reinvention so much as a sharper understanding of the problem it is now best placed to solve.

Ed Taylor first called Blumenfeld before he had founded Honey Bee, the production company he now runs.

“He’s not there to make me feel comfortable,” Taylor wrote. “He’s there to make me clearer. Direct, calm and grounded in having actually lived the trade-offs.”

As Honey Bee grew, the decisions changed. Growth created more opportunities, and more ways to confuse activity with progress.

“I stopped using busy-ness as a substitute for strategy,” he wrote. “It’s very easy, especially when things are going reasonably well, to keep saying yes to work that maintains the company but doesn’t move it.”

That distinction is central to Blumenfeld’s argument.

“Success is useful evidence,” he says. “But it can become a poor decision-maker. Reputation starts organising your future before you’ve decided what you actually want that future to be.”

The market keeps rewarding people for what they are already known to do. Recruiters offer a larger version of the last job. Clients buy the service they bought before. Businesses continue selling the offer that made them successful, sometimes long after customers have begun wanting something else.

“Nobody buys 20 years of experience,” Blumenfeld says. “They buy confidence that you can solve the problem they have now.”

That, for Blumenfeld, is the common thread across sectors. The question is not simply how to preserve a successful career or business through change. It is how to adapt what has already been built so that it remains relevant to the problems people are prepared to pay to solve.

“I’m not asking people to discard the past,” he says. “I’m asking which parts of it still have value, which parts have become habit, and what they want to use all that experience to build now.”

Alongside his private practice, Blumenfeld has worked with The TV Collective on Breakthrough Leaders from its inception, helping develop the coaching approach at the heart of the programme. More than 250 people have completed it. In 2026 the programme is expanding into Global Breakthrough 360, with partners including Fremantle, ITV Studios, Channel 4 and Channel 5.

For someone in obvious crisis, change may be unavoidable. The more interesting cases are often the people for whom nothing is visibly wrong. They can keep going. They can earn more. They can accept another contract, another promotion or another year of the same business.

“Every additional year can make you more credible for the thing you’re trying to leave,” Blumenfeld says. “That’s why these decisions become harder, not easier.”

Find out more about Remy Blumenfeld and his work at Vitality.Guru here.