My career has never followed a particularly neat path, which is probably one of the reasons I’m useful to such a breadth of businesses now.

Before starting my own business, I spent around 20 years working across sales, marketing, project management, fundraising, training, and commercial development.

I’ve been a Fundraising Manager for a charity, worked for the British Psychological Society where I organised events at the Science Museum and Royal Society as part of its centenary celebrations, and have sold ad space for local newspapers and national glossy magazines. 

Later, I became Commercial Development Manager at a further education college, running its business training centre as a commercial operation. I managed teams of up to 50 people, had responsibility for budgets of around £3.5m, worked with employers and funded training programmes, and won and managed substantial project funding.

I also have an MBA, various management qualifications, and a PTLLS teaching qualification.

Then I decided to work for myself.

In 2011, I left my management job and started my own business.

My first month’s invoices came to £127 and I have never been more proud of myself! 

Things grew fairly quickly from there, and within a couple of years I’d built a six-figure marketing and training agency, with an office, a team, apprentices, and a substantial client base.

It was successful, but I didn’t particularly enjoy running it as it felt too close to the manager-staff world I had left behind. 

Eventually I realised I’d built the sort of business I thought I was supposed to want rather than one I actually wanted to run. So I made my staff redundant, closed the limited company, and went back to working much more directly with businesses and organisations.

Since then, my work has taken various forms: consultancy, marketing strategy, business development, training, teaching, projects, and working alongside teams who need another experienced brain involved.

Across all of that, I’ve now worked with around 7,000 business owners and organisations, from people working alone to SMEs, charities, franchises, colleges, universities, councils, and national organisations.

A different brain.

I was diagnosed as autistic ADHD in my 40s, which suddenly explained an awful lot about my brain and how I experience the world.

Pattern recognition is one of the things I do particularly well. Give me a load of seemingly unconnected information and I’ll usually start seeing the threads running through it.

I’m also naturally curious. I want to know why something works, why it doesn’t, why everyone has decided something is true, and whether the obvious problem is actually the problem at all.

That combination has turned out to be extremely useful professionally.

It’s probably also why my work has never fitted particularly neatly into one box. I’m interested in how all the parts of a business affect each other, rather than treating marketing, sales, customers, operations, money, and people as entirely separate things.

Away from work.

I live on the edge of the Peak District with my husband, Jon. We did have a cat, Siouxsie, but she sadly died in 2026 at the ripe old age of almost 21. 

I love theme parks, rollercoasters, fine-dining restaurants, wandering around interesting places, taking photos of everything, and just enjoying my life. 

I ran the Paris Marathon in 2018, which remains one of the coolest (and hardest!) things I’ve ever done, although these days I’m much happier running a Saturday parkrun.

I’m fascinated by people and why we do the things we do. I like documentaries, intelligent conversations, asking awkward questions, and taking pleasure in noticing the little things. 

I also increasingly think that work is allowed to be just one part of a good life rather than the thing that defines it.

That last one has taken me a while.

Current work. 

These days I work as a strategic business and marketing consultant, usually through fractional consultancy, defined projects, training, or focused work with smaller businesses. WORK WITH ME

I also host the Messy Business podcast, where I ask intelligent and sometimes uncomfortable questions about business, work, money, ambition, success, leadership, experience, and what any of it is actually flipping for. LISTEN TO MESSY BUSINESS

And I’m the author of Life In Business, which is about building a business that works in real life rather than blindly following somebody else’s idea of what success is supposed to look like. READ LIFE IN BUSINESS

I occasionally speak at events and appear as a guest on podcasts. KEYNOTES & APPEARANCES