Every strategic deal has a salesperson, a finance lead, and a lawyer.
No one owns the margin.
The gap between forecasted margin and delivered margin costs companies real money. Narrowing it requires authority over the commercial decisions that determine whether margin holds.
Colleen Vossler, Founder & CEO, blueFulcrum™
Technology services deals are structured by lawyers, priced by finance, and negotiated by sales. Each function is capable. Each optimizes for its own outcome. No one owns the commercial architecture of the deal as a whole, and no one is accountable for whether the margin in that architecture holds when a sophisticated buyer demands you absorb unpriced risk. That gap is where margin erodes. It’s the gap Colleen built blueFulcrum to close.
The career that built blueFulcrum
Colleen’s career forged what no single role produces: the transactional lawyer’s risk discipline, the in-house advisor’s business context, the principal’s P&L exposure, and the senior executive’s accountability for commercial outcomes. Each role added another dimension.
At Pillsbury law firm’s internationally recognized technology transactions and sourcing practice, the work was never purely legal. She built commercial strategy, deal structuring, risk allocation, and negotiation discipline across some of the most complex technology services transactions in the market.
Colleen Vossler
Founder & CEO
From Pillsbury she moved to BearingPoint, a global management consulting and technology services firm, as in-house counsel for managed services and commercial advisor. Her commercial judgment earned her a seat on the Managed Services EVP’s advisory board, where she advised on the commercial viability of deals across the portfolio.
She then founded and led her own boutique practice, bringing BigLaw deal discipline and in-house operating perspective to clients. Running a practice of her own added a dimension neither role had provided: the margin pressure that principals feel when every commercial decision is theirs and every consequence lands on the P&L.
Durable deals are built,
not won.
A deal where one side wins on paper and the other absorbs the consequences in delivery isn’t a won deal. It’s a deferred problem, one that shows up in margin variance, relationship damage, and disputes that no one budgeted for.
The deals that hold are the ones where both parties are commercially motivated to perform after the contract is signed. Not because they have to. Because the deal was structured so that performing is the better outcome for both.
That is what blueFulcrum builds toward. The name reflects it: a fulcrum finds the point where force and balance meet. The work is identifying where the commercial architecture of a deal creates that balance, and where it doesn’t, before signature.
The move to senior executive was deliberate. At Infosys, a $19B global technology services organization, she structured and negotiated large-scale IT and BPO outsourcing transactions with offshore delivery models and complex systems implementations, advising on RFP development, proposal evaluation, and negotiation across the full deal lifecycle.
At EY, a $53B professional services firm, as Managing Director on the Strategic Deals Team, she advised on deal shaping, commercial terms, and negotiation strategy for the firm’s most strategically significant technology services pursuits, including managed services.
Across both executive roles, she saw the same patterns repeated across deals done well and done poorly, and drew the conclusion that became blueFulcrum: the difference wasn’t the team or the client. It was whether someone with the right commercial authority was accountable for the outcome.
blueFulcrum was built on what that arc produced
The window to protect margin
closes at signature.
If you’re facing a high-stakes pursuit, a recurring margin problem, or a portfolio company approaching a liquidity event with margin credibility at risk, this is the conversation worth having before the clock runs out.