Executive coaching for leaders who carry the weight at the top

A thinking partner who has actually been in the room

Plenty of coaches understand leadership in theory. Fewer have lived it. I have spent more than thirty years in commercial business: marketing and business development on both the agency and client side, setting up a cloud IT consultancy, and director roles at SaaS startups. I have been an employee, a manager, a member of an executive leadership team, a board director and a non-executive director. I know what it is to sit in the meeting where the numbers are not where they should be, to hold a decision you cannot yet share, and to feel the loneliness that the org chart never warns you about.

That lived experience changes the coaching. You do not have to explain what a board pack is, why a chair matters, or what is really going on in a leadership team that looks fine on paper. We start from a shared understanding of the terrain, and we use the hour for the work that only you can do.

Confidential, and genuinely yours

This is your space, with no agenda other than your growth. As an ICF Professional Certified Coach I am bound by a clear ethical code, and confidentiality is the foundation of it. If your organisation is sponsoring the coaching, we agree up front exactly what is shared and what is not, usually broad themes at most, never the content of our conversations. That protection is what lets you bring the real material: the doubt, the conflict, the relationship that is not working, the version of the decision you would not say out loud anywhere else.

What we tend to work on

• Decisions you are carrying alone, and how to make them well
• Leading through transition, growth, turnaround or a new mandate
• The relationships that shape your effectiveness: your chair, your board, your peers, your direct reports
• Presence and composure under scrutiny, and how you show up when the stakes are high
• The gap between how you lead now and how you want to lead
• Stepping up to a bigger seat, or finding your footing in one you have just taken

Warm, and willing to challenge you

My coaching combines warm, safe energy with gentle challenge. Safe enough that you can be honest, challenging enough that you actually move. I trained with the Co-Active Training Institute, hold systems and relationship coaching credentials with CRR Global, and am an accredited Everything DiSC practitioner, so we can work with the patterns in your behaviour and the dynamics in the systems around you, not just the surface problem. With more than 2,000 coaching hours behind me, this is not theory rehearsed for the first time on you.

I have coached leaders from organisations including Netflix, Purple, Propellernet, Voicescape, Cisco and Searchland. The common thread is not the sector or the size. It is people who are good at what they do, carrying real responsibility, who wanted one relationship where they could think clearly and tell the truth.

The people at the top rarely get coached as people. They get managed, advised and reported to. My job is to be the one person in the week who has no stake in the answer, only in you finding it.

How we start

We begin with a free, no obligation thirty-minute discovery call. It is a conversation, not a pitch. You get a feel for how I work, I understand what you are facing, and we both decide whether this is the right fit. From there we agree a shape that suits your diary and the work in front of you. I am based in Manchester, coach in person across the area, and work online with leaders and teams worldwide.