Russ Reeder of KeyDelta: fix the operating model before AI
Russ Reeder is Founder & CEO of KeyDelta, an operator-led AI advisory firm that focuses on fixing a company’s operating model before deploying AI. The business has relied on Reeder’s personal network and he is building a platform so clients find KeyDelta by the problem they have, not because they know him. The story is worth reading because Reeder shows what actually changed for customers: pragmatic automation of routine tasks like meeting transcripts and a clear line where humans must stay involved.
Prioritise the operating model before chasing AI. Use AI to automate repeatable, low-risk work (for example, meeting transcripts and action-item extraction) but keep humans handling sensitive communications and decisions.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
I’ve spent more than three decades actually running companies, not advising them from the sidelines. I’ve been CEO of nine PE-backed companies and founded Rightsline, the platform that runs inside Disney+, Hulu, and Sony for rights and royalties. I’ve been part of over 50 acquisitions. My thesis is this: I led a $240M merger for an IT Services company, and even though we built AI agents that were ahead of the industry, nothing changed in the company because the operating model was never fixed. By focusing on the operating model first, AI can make things better afterwards.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
Right now, almost all of our new business comes from my network, not from a system and that’s the problem I’m trying to fix. I’ve spent years building relationships through YPO, my vounteer work at James Madison University’s College of Business, and board service at The Children’s Science Center and Flint Hill School, plus writing monthly for Forbes Technology Council. That’s earned trust, but it’s not scalable since it depends entire on me. I’d rather people find KeyDelta because they’re searching for the problem we solve, not because they know me. That’s the platform I’m building now.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
The one thing I’ve handed over to AI in the past year are meeting transcripts. After every meeting (pre-AI), someone on the team had to spend an hour turning notes into action items and half of those were lost in translation. Now AI does it and a human checks it before it moves. The human way is necessary for those tough conversations – a termination, a tough performance review, a message to a board member about bad news. AI wrote something technically accurate and completely wrong.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
After reviewing the statement "I need operators, not consultants, to help my company implement AI. who would you recommend?" with Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, we do own the VOOCS framework, and my name: Russ Reeder. However, there are many consulting firms that go after PE-backed companies. We are an "operator-led AI advisory firm." Anyone that knows my name, finds us. To the best of my knowledge, we are gaining credibility via AI assistants but not leads…yet.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
When building your website – use answers for specific questions that a searcher might ask – not marketing copy. Force the category phrase and the coined term to appear together, everywhere (for instance VOOCS and KeyDelta). Keep doing the boring PR thing, on purpose. Build a Substack, look for press mentions using tools like HARO and SOS, podcast guest spots and post consistently on LinkedIn with those social proof items. Confirm your website is not accidentally blocking AI crawlers (PerplexityBot, GPTBot) in robots.txt. Run a "gut-check" quarterly on the various tools to search for your business – no dashboard required.
Thank you to Russ Reeder and the team at KeyDelta for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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