The values I carried into my CEO role were forged long before I walked through that door. Leading an organisation through transition teaches you things you can’t learn any other way. That understanding shapes everything I do with the founders and business owners I work with today. Let me explain how that shaped the way I work.

Before there was The Purpose Company, I spent my career moving between the private sector, public sector and voluntary sector worlds - each with its own logic, its own definition of success, its own way of doing things. I’ve led in all three, and what that produces isn’t a longer CV. You start to see the patterns that only become visible when you have more than one perspective.

At the centre of that career were eight years as a Chief Executive - leading the strategy, finance, brand, HR and marketing communications simultaneously - in a growing organisation with multiple divisions, multiple workplaces and a senior leadership team to develop and support. That kind of experience leaves a mark, and creates the depth of understanding I bring to every founder, business owner and leader I work with now.

That kind of experience leaves a mark, and creates the depth of understanding I bring to every founder, business owner and leader I work with now.

What follows are three decisions from those years that I think about often — because they taught me things I couldn’t have learned any other way, and because I see versions of the same situations in the businesses I work with today.

Appointed into crisis

The organisation I was appointed to lead had a mission that mattered: reducing inequality, improving lives, ensuring that the people most at risk of being left behind were seen and supported. The kind of work that connects directly to the Millennium Development Goals I’d first encountered in Kenya and have carried ever since.

On my first day, I walked into my predecessor’s office and found her desk exactly as she’d left it — piles of papers, reports and funding applications covered in a dusting of London grime. She had walked out on her last day without looking back. Staff were unprepared for my arrival; I’d been told I couldn’t visit before starting as it might unsettle people. The organisation had recently been through a merger, and it emerged that the legal and administrative aspects of that merger had been the sole focus. Everything else had been left.

When I reviewed the financials against the grant we’d just been awarded, there was a significant gap. The financial information had been kept deliberately opaque. And the prevailing culture was one I recognised immediately: delivering services on a shoestring, accepting whatever funders wanted regardless of whether it was safe or sustainable, going along to get along.

I kept what I’d found close — shared only with my Board — while I figured out how we were going to respond. A leader’s job, in those early days, is to absorb the weight of what she knows so that the organisation can keep functioning while she works out the path forward.

Decision one: saying no before I knew what yes looked like

My first decision was to refuse the culture of delivering services unsafely on a shoestring. I made clear that I was willing to cut services if necessary rather than deliver them badly. It was a significant call to make before I’d had time to fully understand the organisation — and I made sure my Board understood and supported it before I made it publicly. That mandate mattered. Walking into a difficult situation without clear backing is a risk no leader should take if she can help it.

What this taught me: the first decision a leader makes in a new role sets the tone for everything that follows. It tells the organisation what you stand for before you’ve had the chance to demonstrate it any other way. Getting it right — and having your key stakeholders behind you — is worth more than any strategy document.

Decision two: solving the immediate crisis before anything else

The funding gap had to be addressed before I could do anything else. The relationship with our principal funder had been adversarial under my predecessor. Being new gave me something valuable: the chance to start again without that history.

I went to meet the Assistant Director who held the purse strings — not to defend our position or argue for more money, but to understand what she actually needed. Her biggest problem was hospital beds being blocked by patients who couldn’t be discharged because the community services to support them at home didn’t exist. That was precisely our area of expertise. So instead of two organisations pulling against each other, we aligned our objectives around the outcomes that mattered most to both of us. I showed her how we could move the metrics she cared about most.

She increased our funding. That created the breathing space we needed.

Around the same time, a few days before payroll was due, my Finance Officer told me we didn’t have enough in the bank to pay salaries. We hadn’t been billing correctly, and payment turnaround times were running at weeks rather than days. I called a key contact at the Council, explained the situation, and got invoices processed urgently. Salaries were paid.

That experience has never left me. Every business owner I work with hears, at some point, about understanding their cash flow, building a financial cushion and growing sustainably. Not as a theoretical principle. As something I know from experience.

Decision three: creating space to think

Once the immediate crisis was stabilised, I faced a choice. I could keep reacting — solving one problem as it surfaced, then the next, then the next — or I could stop, step back, and build the strategic foundation that would let me get ahead of events rather than behind them. I knew which one would serve the organisation. I also knew that if I didn’t create the space deliberately, the problems would keep coming and I’d never find it.

There was no budget for an offsite. So I went to the public library for two days.

I’d already gathered everything I needed: what our funders wanted, the financials, previous annual reports, the review I’d been appointed to implement. The first day was about getting it all in front of me at once — a SWOT analysis, a PESTLE analysis, a risk assessment, laid out on large sheets of paper so I could see the whole picture. The second day was where the thinking shifted. I started to envision where we could go, to write down what that future looked like, and to find the synergies between the vision, the mission, the values and the objectives that would get us there.

It wasn’t a linear process. I went back and forth between the analysis and the vision, each one sharpening the other. By the afternoon of the second day I had a mind map with seven strategic objectives and a clear sense of what each required, in what order. That went onto a spreadsheet — this was before the days of project management software — and became the foundation for everything that followed.

What grounded the whole process was values. Not as an exercise, but as the thing that made the strategic choices legible. When you’re clear about what you stand for, decisions that look complicated become simpler. The values don’t make the hard things easy — but they tell you which hard things are worth doing.

Out of that process came something I’m particularly proud of. The people working in the organisation weren’t motivated by performance metrics — they were motivated by the difference they made to people’s lives. A family supported through a crisis. A person staying in their own home. A community with somewhere to turn. That was what they’d come to do, and that was what sustained them.

So I reframed our reporting around impact rather than metrics — telling the story of what had actually changed for the people we served, in language that meant something to the people delivering the services. This gave staff a way to see their own contribution clearly. It gave funders and commissioners a compelling account of what their investment was producing. And it gave the organisation a shared sense of purpose that no strategy document on its own could have created.

What we were doing then, before the language existed for it, is what the B Corp movement now calls measuring what matters. I didn’t call it an Impact Report at the time. I just knew that people do their best work when they can see the meaning in it — and that finding the right language for that meaning is one of a leader’s most important jobs.

What followed

Over the three years that followed, the organisation was transformed. Revenue trebled. We achieved Investors in People and the regulatory accreditations that signalled we were operating to the highest professional standards.

What produced these results was values in action. Pathways built one by one toward a future worth working for. And people who could see — clearly, in the work they did every day — the difference they were making.

The glass cliff — and the decision that followed

There is a well-documented phenomenon in leadership research called the glass cliff. Women are disproportionately appointed to senior leadership roles during periods of crisis and organisational decline — given the hardest jobs, at the worst moments, often with the least support. When things go wrong, as they frequently do in turnaround situations, it is the woman at the top who takes the fall. When things go right, the credit tends to distribute more broadly.

I had lived this. And when the time came to think about what I wanted to do next, I looked clearly at the landscape of available roles and understood what I was seeing. The positions most likely to come my way were the ones in difficulty — organisations in crisis, in decline, in need of someone willing to walk into the fire. I had done that once, learned from it enormously, and had no interest in repeating it on someone else’s terms.

So I made a different decision. To build something of my own — on my own terms, oriented toward the future I wanted to create, drawing on everything I’d learned across a career that had taken me further than I’d imagined when I was sitting at Heathrow with just enough money for a flight to Kenya.

That decision became The Purpose Company.

What this means for the business owners I work with

When I work with a founder who has just discovered something in her finances she wasn’t expecting, I know what that moment feels like. When I work with a business owner who has walked into a situation that was not what she expected, I know what that requires. When I work with someone who is trying to hold the clarity for her team while she finds her own footing, I know what that discipline demands.

And when I work with a founder who is building her strategy on a kitchen table because there’s no budget for anything else, who needs to bring her team with her, who wants to build something that reflects her values and needs to know that this is a strength and not a liability — I know that territory from the inside.

Twenty-five years across private, public and voluntary sectors. Eight years as a CEO running an organisation through every kind of weather. Leaving to build a consultancy, and eventually to founding The Purpose Company.

That breadth of experience is what I bring. And if you’d like to understand how I put it to work, the next step is here.