Trent West is the founder of APG Partners and the former Chief Operating Officer of Foundation Education Group. He has more than 20 years of management and operational experience, including almost a decade helping build, transform and scale one of Australia's largest private vocational education groups.
As COO, Trent held executive responsibility across education, operations, student experience, quality and compliance, technology, organisational performance and major transformation programs. As part of the executive leadership team, he helped move Foundation from recurring losses to sustained profitability, helped scale the group from approximately 7,000 to 16,000 students and built the operating systems required to support national scale. He conceived and led commercial initiatives that opened new revenue lines, reshaped the economics of the business and created substantial enterprise value.
His work has consistently sat at the intersection of strategy and execution. He understands how commercial decisions affect operations, how operating decisions affect margin and how growth exposes weaknesses in systems, leadership and accountability. He built the APG Performance System to make that operating discipline repeatable, tracking the chain from diagnostic finding to initiative to financial outcome.
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We work from the data. Not from what the business already thinks.
We work from the data: financials, commercial performance, operating reality. Not from interviews or facilitated sessions that reflect what the business already thinks. We apply financial and commercial depth that most advisory work does not bring: reading a P&L properly, understanding margin at the unit level, identifying where cash is being created and where it is being consumed.
We work from outside the organisation. No prior relationship to protect, no existing recommendation to defend, no incentive to tell you what you want to hear.
We deliver a finding, not a facilitation. The analysis is ours.
Case studies
Proof. Not Promises.
Education
$10M EBITDA Improvement
From Weekly Cash Losses to ~$10m EBITDA
A national education provider was losing $40k per week with a customer rating below 1.5 stars. We rebuilt the commercial model and turned it into the largest provider in the country.
Healthcare
$3M Value Created
From Sustained Losses to >$500k Profit
A GP practice was losing over $350k annually, propped up by the owner's consulting income. We rebuilt the practice model and delivered over $500k profit within six months.
If performance is below potential, the first step is knowing precisely why.
A Commercial Assessment takes two to four weeks. Fixed fee. At the end, you have a clear picture of what is constraining performance, where the opportunity is, and what should happen first.
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