I work at the point where the parts of a business have to connect.
That has been true of almost every role I have held, long before any of it was called strategy.
My strategic perspective came from a cross-functional route rather than a strategy-only career path, and that is the reason I can see the whole system rather than one function of it.
The early work built expertise in communications, audiences, customer behaviour, stakeholder engagement, research, brand and positioning. Understanding how people actually decide, and what makes a proposition land, turned out to be foundational rather than peripheral.
Over time the roles widened into business development, growth, operations, organisational alignment, culture and corporate development, and eventually into whole-business strategy. Each move added another part of the system, so strategy never became an analytical exercise separated from the people, products, operations and commercial choices it has to work through.
Today I work with founders and leadership teams to create strategy and make it live in the organisation: understanding the context, surfacing assumptions, pressure-testing choices, connecting decisions across the system, and building the capability to keep adapting.
Strategy that is human, practical and ready for what changes.
Better decisions sit where three things overlap.
Strategic clarity
Understanding what matters most, making sense of complexity and choosing a direction with confidence.
Human judgement
Grounding strategy in real insight, values and context. Tools and frameworks support thinking; they do not replace it.
AI as a tool
Used thoughtfully, to broaden perspective, challenge thinking and test assumptions, in service of people and purpose, not instead of them.
All of it in context
None of the three means anything in the abstract. They apply to a particular business in a particular market, and that context keeps moving, which is why none of it can be assumed.
Not a rigid methodology. A sequence I return to, adapted to what the work needs.
Never defined once and filed away.
It is not defined once and filed away. A competitive advantage is created and then sustained, by observing, deciding, acting, learning and adapting. That is why the goal of an engagement is never only an answer, and why a position that cannot survive a change in the market was never much of one.
- 01
Explore
Understand the real situation with curiosity and rigour, across functions rather than within one.
- 02
Clarify
Uncover what actually matters, surface the assumptions underneath it and frame better choices.
- 03
Enhance
Bring frameworks, research and evidence in where they broaden perspective and test the thinking.
- 04
Decide
Make the decisions, with enough confidence and alignment that they hold outside the room.
- 05
Act & adapt
Turn decisions into action, then keep learning as the context moves, because it will.
“Joining the dots across a business, seeing the whole system, and asking the questions others don’t.” How clients describe the work
Why I built tools rather than only taking on clients.
A good engagement should not leave an organisation dependent on an external strategist. It should leave it better at strategic practice than it was, able to keep making good decisions as the context keeps changing.
That belief is why the founder work exists in the form it does. Not everyone needs, or can justify, an embedded adviser. But the same structural questions come up again and again, and they can be made accessible: as a system to work through, a room with facilitation in it, or a group that keeps you honest over a year.
doFlo / Glow
Fractional Director of Strategy & Growth, 2024 to present. Shaping and delivering strategic vision across brand, marketing and operations in an AI-powered automation start-up, connecting brand, product and operational thinking, scenario planning and horizon scanning, positioning and operational design.
Independent strategic advisory
Embedded work with early-to-growth-stage tech and service businesses: connecting strategy across growth, operations and organisational design; brand and product positioning; market narrative; investor readiness and strategic fundraising support.
Alchemy Energy Partners
Director of Corporate Development, having first consulted to the business. Worked with the partners on brand and on the services and products the group planned to offer, extending into operations, internal communications, culture, training and mentoring.
Steel Mountain Systems
Employee number one and Fractional Head of Marketing at the cybersecurity SaaS business, leading marketing and strategic brand positioning through to its acquisition by Avast in 2018. The strategy work there is where Clarity First began.
Earlier commercial grounding
Agency and client-side roles across hospitality, entertainment, professional services and consumer brands, including Curzon Cinemas, Sky, HCA Healthcare, Mastercard and Pitman Training, covering customer insight, segmentation, CRM, stakeholder engagement and business development.
Oxford Saïd
AI-Driven Business Transformation Executive Programme at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, completed in the top band. Strengthens the work on strategy under uncertainty and the future context organisations are deciding in.