20+ years of
commercial
leadership

My Story

Bridging strategy and delivery

I work with SME founders who've hit a ceiling. Not because the product's wrong or the market's gone, but because the commercial engine, the strategy, the sales structure, the accountability, hasn't kept pace with the ambition. That's where I come in.

Over 20 years I've built that engine for businesses across the UK, EMEA and APAC, working with clients both here in Cambridgeshire and internationally. My own path here wasn't obvious, and that's exactly why it works.

From the catwalk to the boardroom

I graduated early with a degree in Textile and Fashion Design and went straight to work for Missoni in Italy, designing for the catwalks in Milan with barely a word of the language. It was a brilliant education in creativity and detail. When I came home, I stayed close to that world, moving into design sales, but the part I loved most was never really the product itself. It was sitting with a client, working out what problem they actually had, and building the solution around it. That's solution selling, though I didn't have a name for it at the time. I just knew I was better at listening than I was at drawing.

I built on that as a Sales Manager leading teams, then in commercial interiors with high net worth clients. Different rooms, same instinct: understand what someone actually needs, not just what they say they want.

Eight years across Asia

Then I got the travel bug, properly. I spent the next eight and a half years living and working across Asia, based in Singapore and Shanghai, and operating right across the wider APAC region, at board level with global organisations. My work spanned innovation centres in Germany, client headquarters in the US, and commercial relationships across every major APAC market. It's the kind of seniority and scope most UK commercial directors never get exposure to. What I valued most was the people side of it: building genuine trust across wildly different cultures, and developing the junior salespeople on my teams as they found their feet in markets that could be genuinely disorienting.

Why founders work with me

Back in the UK for good, I moved into senior leadership roles. One old boss, back in my interiors days, once wrote in a reference that I was as comfortable in a boardroom as I was on a building site in a hard hat.

"I talk to a site manager differently to a finance director, and I manage a confident salesperson differently to one still finding their feet. That's not inconsistency. That's paying attention."

That's really the difference I bring as a fractional commercial director, or a fractional sales director if that's the term you know better. I don't hand over a plan and walk away. I build the strategy, the structure and the accountability that turns growth ambitions into results, and I do it with the people who actually have to make it work. If that sounds like what your business needs, take a look at how I work with clients or get in touch to talk it through.