Career Background

At the start of my career I worked directly in business, starting as a graduate finance trainee at Ford Motor Company, having graduated in business studies. I was then later headhunted to join Visa International with the carrot of international travel. This happened straight away with my training commencing in various cities in America. I was invited to set up my own department, recruiting staff and as a team travelling around the world undertaking bank profitability studies, including living and working in Italy for a year. During this time I qualified as an accountant, where I was awarded the Sir Ian Morrow Prize by CIMA, later becoming a Fellow of the Institute.

A curiosity in cutting edge business ideas – specifically business process re-engineering at this time – led me to join Ernst and Young as a management consultant. I went straight into learning business process re-engineering, change management and facilitation.

During this time I became expert at developing Board-level business cases, which has been an invaluable skill throughout my career.

One of my most exciting assignments was taking on the role of acting Finance Director for the strategy development, design, set-up and launch of a new company, Goldfish, for British Gas which went on to grow into a successful business of over 1,000 staff.

My need to continue learning led me to want to learn more about people consulting and I joined PA Consulting as they had at the time one of the top People Partners in the country. I worked on a number of HR Transformations – Sainsburys, Norwich Union and Barclays Capital – and other assignments including culture change and change management. Despite being a bit reluctant to go for Partner – there were only 2 female partners out of 120 partners globally – through coaching I gained the courage to do so.

As a partner I led Change Management globally for PA Consulting.

I led a pan-European team to create the change methodology, collation of best practice case studies and world-wide training programme – training all consultants – with the view that all consultants need to be competent in change. I worked on some really interesting assignments for HR Board Directors, solving issues they were facing and realising how much I enjoyed working on assignments where there was no precedent and the answer required real creativity.

For my own growth being a partner was a really important step for me. As I successfully fulfilled the role after a few years I needed another big goal. I had been exploring transformational leadership and I wanted a transformational goal to take the Division to the next level i.e. to be the leading people consultancy in Europe. I had even inspired a boutique transformational leadership consultancy to work with us for free. Presenting my strategic thinking to my Divisional partners, I was thwarted at one pivotal meeting. This became a defining moment for me. The following morning for the first time I did not want to cross the threshold into the building at work – my motivation had died. However, it got me thinking in the background about what would I really regret not doing in my life. So, using a transformational coach, I came back again (as I had in my late twenties) with the desire to do something artistic and my loves were acting and film. Although initially this seemed too out there, over several months I worked out I could take a year’s sabbatical to explore this area. I was also fortunate to have saved enough money to make this option feasible.

I started with a three months practical ‘hands on’ film course in London, producing my first short, including everything from writing the script, casting the actors, editing and composing the music to the final edit. Following that I worked on film pilots and shorts as a production assistant and began to realise that I should just take the leap to producing.

So I set up a company, went to the Cannes Film Festival and networked.

I got some leads and began working on script development with a director and a little later was invited to help make a film pro bono on Aids orphans in Malawi for UNICEF. It was an amazing experience and very humbling. It made me realise, during the edit and scriptwriting for voice-overs, how difficult it is working with this kind of material. It has led me to so admire the resilience of staff working on the ground day-to-day in such desperate human situations.

Following on from this, it became clear to me that with the effort it takes to make a film, I needed the film’s subject matter to have some deeper meaning to make it all worthwhile. And then suddenly serendipity put me in touch with two film producers who were wanting to set up a new film model, making socially conscious commercial films. The model involved three key parties – a corporate, a charity and a film production company – all three having an affinity with the subject matter and message of the film.

We learned to be very bold, knocking on doors, telephoning senior people with our ideas and we gained traction early. However as we worked further on developing the company and gained more clarity on the financials, we realised that the business case for the company would not wash its face. The likelihood of profitability or even breakeven to sustain three staff and two part-time staff would not work. This is without any doubt the most complex business case I have worked on. As hidden business assumptions on film profitability became clearer it became obvious that this venture was only going to work as a foundation, with external donor funding, not what we were looking to do.

At this point I had reached a cross-roads – what next? How will I earn money moving forwards? I looked at many different avenues – CEO of a small charity, going back into consultancy. To ensure I leveraged the skills I had picked up in film I looked to move into the media sector. This was easier said than done and for the first time in my career I was utilising recruitment agencies. I then made an error. I went to a consultancy who said at the time they had media clients and I didn’t do my due diligence. I went there, and within two months my father was taken very ill, at a time when I should have extracted myself out of the company immediately. However, my priority was my father, so I stuck with it and was put on a Government project which was failing big time, whilst being a very big revenue earner over three years for the consultancy. This turned out unexpectedly to be a really exciting project because we were given free rein to do whatever it took to turn the project around.

I took up the marketing position, managing a PR company, a marketing company and managing internal communications.

Our project was nominated for a Management Consultancy Award and at the Awards Ceremony with the client, I bumped into a senior partner at PA Consulting who suggested I come back to PA. I decided it was time to leave and, as I was getting married, I would take a short sabbatical and do some freelancing prior to re-joining PA.

My confidence had taken a huge hit at the previous consultancy and PA provided a safe haven for me to slowly get my confidence back. Here I trained with Ashridge, PA and Henley in Business Redesign, which I thoroughly enjoyed, bringing together my loves of strategy and design. The course was really robust, being part-time over a year and I straight away applied it to the most complex organisational design I have done to date – designing the first payments system’s regulator in the world. This brought together both my design skills and my understanding of payments. I led a team of six Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) staff, who had never been involved in redesign, teaching and transferring my skills. With the Executives we worked through the high level design and then worked through the detailed design, recruited the staff, MD and Executive team and launched the company. I really enjoyed working with the FCA. I found it refreshing working with teams who were committed to making the world a better place for consumers, and who had a good working relationship and attitude to one another. In fact I went on to do a lot of work with the regulators and with industry associations on various projects.

I did reach a point at PA where I was really happy with my clients but not so happy in the office environment and I thought at that stage I would be better off going freelance. So this is what I did.

In fact I landed a project straight away with Lloyds Bank and then was offered to take up a role as Interim Open Banking Director. I greatly enjoyed working for the Payments Director, although the project I came in to help turnaround was very complex given the need to be inclusive across the whole of the organisation for the first company-wide regulatory agile change programme.

I relaunched the programme and stayed with it for a year, using all my tenacity to keep myself embedded within the programme leadership to ensure the wider company was involved at every stage.

The good news is we hit the regulatory deadline and in fact were the only large bank to do so.

I then took an interim position at Pay.UK as Head of Strategy, Standards, IT Architecture, Data and Innovation. I had prior knowledge of this organisation and the CEO because I had designed the amalgamation of the payments companies whilst at PA. So now to be involved in the merger and setting up of one of the departments was wonderful. I really enjoyed this time and really enjoyed working with the CEO and the Executive team. It was hard work doing merger implementation and also trying to design a new IT architecture for the UK, and in hindsight we were asked by the regulator to do too much at once. However, fantastic experience and working for a great boss.

Following this interim role I fulfilled a dream which I had had since a teenager and I finally, after much deliberation, bought myself a horse, the summer before lockdown. Doing this has been transformational because it has moved me to live mostly in Dorset and to also work either part-time or on short burst projects.

So in the last two years I have been freelancing and working on various projects from accelerated organisational design with Executive teams, to facilitating the strategy of a company within the MOD, to qualifying as an Executive coach with Barefoot Training and delivering coaching programmes. I have graduated from the Women on Boards Programme with Deloittes and am currently a trustee on the board of the Hofesh Shechter international dance company (who are amazing!). I also associate with a company called GameShift, where I worked with one of the co-founders over 20 years ago at PA Consulting. They specialise as thinking partners to companies worldwide.