Mark Crowle-Groves

For more than twenty years I have been the person accountable for IT inside the business, not an adviser looking in from the outside. Most of that time was spent as an IT Director: answerable to a board and C-suite, running budgets of up to $5 million, and owning the gap between what the technology needed and what the organization was ready to invest in.

Much of that experience has been in private-equity-backed and high-growth businesses, environments defined by heavy financial scrutiny, frequent acquisitions, and an IT function still catching up with the pace of the business. The work has spanned international operations, cross-functional teams, and heavily regulated environments, including HIPAA, SOC 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR.

I have led IT through multiple acquisitions and post-close integrations, worked alongside the private equity sponsors and deal teams behind them, built or rebuilt departments that had grown faster than their foundations, and overseen software development alongside core infrastructure. This is hands-on experience: I have done these things directly, not just managed the people who did them. It is also why a conversation with me tends to start with the business problem rather than the solution, and why the answer has to hold up commercially, not only technically.

Layered Grey is how I bring that experience to organizations that need senior IT leadership without carrying it full-time, or that want someone alongside an existing team for a specific problem or a defined period. In practice that ranges from setting technology direction for a growing business, to preparing infrastructure for a transaction, to the identity, platform, and infrastructure work that is far easier to navigate having done it before.

A large part of the work is helping a business see IT as a strategic partner in its growth, not just a facilitator that keeps things running. That holds regardless of size or ownership model. The common thread is financial discipline and a need for clear technology direction, whether a business is sponsor-backed, scaling on its own, or carefully managing its operating spend.

Layered Grey is a US-based company and works with clients remotely. The model is simple: senior IT leadership, scoped to exactly what the problem requires, for as long as it requires it.