A bigger decision. A growing team. A new direction for the business. A role that is asking something different of you. Or simply recognising that the way you’ve led until now needs to evolve.

Next Level Leader is tailored 1:1 executive and business coaching for leaders who want to think clearly, make higher-impact decisions and lead effectively, as the business around them evolves.

My approach combines professional coaching, consulting and mentoring expertise with deep commercial, financial and leadership experience – bringing an independent perspective to the challenges and decisions that matter most to you.

There isn’t one version of stepping up as a leader.

You might be building a team that can take more responsibility, so you can step back from decisions that no longer need to sit with you.

You might be looking again at the strategy of a business that has been successful for years, but now needs something different.

Perhaps there’s a significant commercial decision ahead. A product or market is changing. An opportunity has appeared that you need to weigh carefully. Or there’s a risk you know needs more thought before it becomes a problem.

It might be about people rather than strategy: how you lead a particular person or handle a difficult stakeholder, or how you get a leadership team working together more effectively. It could be about successfully establishing yourself in a role.

You’re good at what you do. The business is doing well. But you know that continuing to lead well in such a noisy world means focusing your time to make the biggest impact and creating the space to proactively look at what the business needs next.

Your next level won’t look like somebody else’s.

I ask the questions that help you get underneath the issue.

I challenge your thinking when it needs challenging, and I bring commercial perspective when it adds value.

That might mean looking at a problem from a different angle, weighing risk and opportunity, testing whether an assumption really stacks up, or helping you spot something you haven’t considered yet.

Sometimes the most useful thing I can do is keep asking questions while you work something out for yourself.

At other times, it makes little sense for me to pretend that 16 years of commercial, financial and leadership experience isn’t sitting in the room. If there’s relevant experience, a useful framework, a financial perspective or a practical way of approaching something, I can bring that into the conversation too.

That mix matters to me.

We can coach. We can explore. We can challenge assumptions. We can get into the numbers. We can sketch something out, build a model, work through options or look at how a conversation with a member of your team might need to happen.

The work follows what will be most useful to you.

Working together, I can help you to see the situation more clearly, make higher-impact decisions and lead effectively as the business around you evolves.

The starting point will be what is happening in your business and leadership now.

For one person, the work might centre on delegating more effectively as a team grows. For another, it could be establishing themselves as MD after years as part of the leadership team. Someone else might need a space to think through strategy, interrogate their numbers or decide whether a significant opportunity is actually the right one.

Some of the areas we might explore include:

• Strategy and the future direction of the business
• Significant commercial decisions
• Leadership style and making better use of your strengths
• Delegation, accountability and letting go without losing control
• Building and developing the people around you
• Difficult team or performance situations
• Stakeholder relationships and influence
• Financial performance, KPIs and the commercial levers of the business
• Risk, opportunity and the consequences of different choices
• Priorities: what deserves your attention and what doesn’t
• Navigating growth, restructuring or other significant change
• Creating space to look ahead rather than only responding to what is urgent

We start with you, the business and what would make the biggest difference.

Alongside our regular one-to-one coaching sessions, we have our own private Microsoft Teams environment, giving us one secure place for the conversations, documents and thinking that sit around them.

If there’s a strategy document you want to explore, you can put it there. If you want me to understand a set of figures before we meet, share them in advance. If you’ve drafted something following one of our sessions and want my thoughts before taking it further, you know where to put it.

That means we can both arrive at our coaching sessions ready to get into the useful part of the conversation, rather than spending time getting up to speed.

We also keep a shared view of what we’re currently working on: there’s space to capture actions, keep sight of the things you’ve decided to move forward, and hold ideas or questions that aren’t urgent now but could be valuable to explore later.

Alongside that, I capture the important themes and progress across the engagement – not a transcript of every coaching conversation, but the things worth keeping hold of.

It creates continuity: you can see where the work is moving, we can revisit something that came up several weeks ago, and if something develops between sessions, you have a place to share it or continue the conversation without waiting for another meeting to come around.

This gives our work one home, helps us use our time together well and keeps momentum when there is something worth moving forward.

Why work with me?

My route into coaching has been a varied one.

I studied aerospace engineering, specialising in astronautics, before joining EY and qualifying as a Chartered Accountant with ICAS. I then spent 16 years in the Big Four and FTSE 100 businesses, including Rolls-Royce and Experian.

Over time, my work moved beyond getting the numbers right into helping leaders work out what to do with them. I investigated complex issues for Finance Directors, built tools that helped non-finance leaders test different scenarios, worked through major commercial and organisational change, and helped shape decisions around strategy, pricing, risk and investment.

I also led multinational teams and sat on leadership teams for a 140-person service centre, an 8-figure technology centre and an 8-figure revenue-generating business unit. Later, I co-founded and ran a small business too – a very different perspective on leadership and commercial reality.

The specific outcomes will depend on why you came: for some leaders, success means being substantially less involved in the day-to-day because their team now owns more. For others, it means making a strategic decision they had been circling for months.

It might mean handling a conversation differently, understanding the business numbers at a deeper level, changing where you spend your time or recognising a risk early enough to do something useful about it.

Sometimes the change is visible quickly.

Sometimes it is the accumulation of many smaller changes: different questions, better delegation, more deliberate decisions, a clearer view of what matters and greater confidence in where you are taking the business.

One client described my coaching as helping them move from a “plate-spinning, strategy-less quagmire of tasks” towards a more purposeful and strategic approach.

Another talked about being able to focus on the activities that would make the biggest difference to their business.

The aim isn’t to turn you into somebody else’s idea of the perfect leader.

It is to help you become more effective at the level you are now operating – and better prepared for whatever the business asks of you next.

Next Level is designed for capable business leaders in established businesses – typically CEOs, MDs, founders and senior leadership team directors.

You might know exactly what you want to work on or you might simply recognise that something about your role, leadership or business deserves more thought than you are currently able to give it.

Next Level is about having enough space to manoeuvre: to look at what is happening now, to notice what might be coming and to make deliberate changes while you still have room to make them well.

“Calm”, “insightful”, “supportive”, “thought-provoking” – words most commonly used by my clients to describe our sessions.

It’s the space that makes it possible to have meaningful, open conversations about the difficult questions, bringing enough challenge to get somewhere useful, and enough space for you to decide what you actually want to do next.

This isn’t right for you if:

Which means the first conversation should be too. You don’t need to diagnose yourself before we speak.
You don’t need to choose whether you need “executive coaching”, “business coaching”, mentoring or consulting.
And you certainly don’t need to arrive with a perfectly formed coaching objective.

We can start with what is happening, what is changing and what you want to be different.

From there, we can consider whether having me alongside you would be useful.

Would you like to explore that?