From maternity cover to a 200 person redesign

The first job was covering someone else's. A decade later it was rebuilding how a 200 person business worked, then selling the result to British Airways.

Marketing exec at a wine company, filling in for someone on maternity leave. I've never really stopped covering for the thing that needs doing. By my mid twenties I was running an 18 person call centre team & had grown Motorola 30% into the biggest client in the business, mostly by refusing to accept that anything was somebody else's job.

Then eBay bought the martech business I was at, everything broke, & a VP asked me to help redesign how 200 people worked. We productised what came out of it & sold it to British Airways for £60k. It took 30% of the man hours out of their campaign delivery.

That was when I worked out that fixing the machine is worth more than working harder inside it. Everything since has been a version of the same job.

Knowing the client's business better than they do

Why the QBR deck was never the job.

That's the bit that gets me out of bed. Not the deck. The reason a renewal is wobbling six months before anyone says the word, & the reason the thing they asked for isn't the thing they need.

I don't do it by being formal about it. I've handled C-suite for years & I'll do it properly, but I've never worn a suit to tick a box. What senior stakeholders work out quite quickly is that I give a shit, I'll cut through the noise, I'll ask the question everyone in the room is avoiding, & I'll come back with the work done rather than a recommendation about who should do it.

A £40,000 quote, and four hours

What happened when I stopped waiting for a budget and opened a laptop instead.

I'd sketched an app & got a quote back for £40k. I thought about it for an afternoon, then started building it myself. v1 existed four hours later. It's now on v22 with 100 testers.

Same instinct at Stitch. Rather than wait for a CRM project, I built the UK sales & delivery operating system myself. Pipeline, forecasting, resourcing, billing, profitability… all wired together, all live, all feeding off the CRM, the calendar, the inbox & the meeting notes.

I'm not a qualified developer & I'm not going to pretend to be one. But I am technical, I've always had to be, & being the person who sits between the commercial room & the engineering room is where I've been most useful my whole career.

A cycling brand that doubles as a laboratory

Kit, route guides, a riding club in London, and a full commercial motion with nobody to sign it off.

Velovie is a cycling apparel label & a hyperlocal riding community. I manufacture the kit, publish the route guides, build the storefront & lead the rides. It looks like a hobby & it isn't. It's the only place I get to run an entire commercial motion end to end with nobody to approve it, & almost everything I learn there comes back into the day job.

The rest of it is early starts, a lot of miles, & a dog called JayJay who gets the middle of my day whatever else is happening.

Stitch closed the UK role in May

£930K closed in year one, from nothing. Then a restructure.

I was the first Client Partner they appointed outside the US & I built the UK business from the ground up. £930K closed in year one against a £2.5M pipeline I qualified myself. The role went in a restructure, which is how it goes sometimes.

So I'm looking for the next one. Customer success leadership, UK & EMEA, somewhere that wants the function built properly rather than staffed. If that's you, I'd rather hear about it than not.