About Helen 

I have been where you are. That is why this works. 

Leadership coach, facilitator, AI Adopter. Helping leaders navigate the complexity of modern-day leadership. 
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The Story

The moment everything changed

My first real leadership test came at PepsiCo. I was given a business development team of 65 people. Van sales, graduate recruitment, business strategy, all at once. Within weeks, I was running around trying to know everything about everything, feeling completely out of control.

Then a mentor sat me down and said something I have never forgotten.
"Helen, your role has changed. You need to create time, not just to be in the work, but to lead it."

That one conversation changed how I approached leadership. Not because it gave me a framework. Because it gave me permission to stop disappearing into the work and start leading it.
The career behind the coaching 

Real leadership. Real organisations. Real experience. 

Stats:   15+ Years in Senior roles  |   150 largest team led   |   10+ Years coaching

From that first leadership role at PepsiCo, I went on to Gatorade Schweppes and then to Brickvick Softdrinks, where I reached director level. I led teams through mergers, reorganisations, IPOs, and every variation of business pressure you can imagine. I've led co-located teams, remote teams, and hybrid teams, all of it. 

That experience is not a footnote to my coaching; it is the foundation of it. 

Senior roles at: Pepsico, Cadbury Schweppes, Britvic Soft Drinks

Clients and organisations I have worked with since include: UEFA, Cegos, Moy Park, Hero UK&I, YF, PerfectTed, L'Occitane
The Framework

What I learned, and why it matters to you.

The insight from that early PepsiCo moment never left me and guided me through the rest of my corporate career. And when I moved into coaching, I saw the same thing everywhere: brilliant, capable leaders stuck in reactive mode. Not because they lacked ambition or skill, but because they had missed the foundation.

You cannot lead others well until you have learned to lead yourself first.

That is the principle behind the leader's ladder, the framework that underpins everything I do. It has four rungs, and they work in two parts.

The first two are about you:
1. Mindset is about who you want to be as a leader, your vision for yourself, and the standards you hold yourself to.
2. Systems is about your ways of working, the habits, rhythms, and structure that bring that leader to life every week.

The second two are about others:
3.  Influence is about how you take people with you, your team, your stakeholders, and the people above and around you.
4.  Coaching is about how you build the capability of your people in a way that empowers rather than creates dependency.

I've noticed that most managers tend to jump straight to influence and coaching, but without the first two rungs in place, it never seems to stick.

What I took from all of it was this: when a leader gets clear on who they want to be and builds the systems to match, the rest follows. The influence, the trust, the team that actually performs.

Then AI arrived, and I couldn't stop thinking about it. 

When AI became genuinely useful, I started experimenting with it, adding it into my business. I was equally amazed by its capability and nervous about where it would lead.

I kept coming back to one question: if I were still a director leading a large team, how would I actually use this? Not in theory, but in the reality of a full calendar, a complex team, and a strategy that never sat still.

I ran every experiment through that lens, meeting prep, team reviews, planning and strategic thinking

What I found was this: AI works best when you have already built the context for it to work with. The system and the way of working have to come first.

I also saw what was happening for my clients. AI had become yet another thing on an already impossible plate. Most leaders I have met are curious but challenged by the fact that there is no obvious way to bring it in without adding to the pressure they were already under.

That is what my coaching now addresses: not an AI course, but a leadership workflow reset with AI embedded where it genuinely helps, so it becomes the thing that takes plates away rather than adds to them.
What I believe. 

The principles behind the work 

The most important thing a senior leader can do is to create the conditions for their team to do their best work, not by doing more, but by thinking better, planning deliberately, and having the right conversations before they become emergencies.

Leadership is a series of conversations, and most of the time, the reason those conversations don't happen well is the lack of thinking time that makes them possible.

There is an enormous amount of untapped potential inside every organisation right now. Most leaders already know what good looks like. They just haven't had the space or the system to make it real. That gap is where I do my best work.
The Bigger Mission

Building something that lasts.

My goal is simple. To help as many managers as I possibly can become confident, strategic, human-centred leaders, ready for a world where AI is part of every working day. That is the legacy I am building.

That mission lives in my YouTube channel, my LinkedIn content, and the free resources I share every week. If you are not yet ready to work together directly, start there.

YouTube: Weekly practical content on leadership, systems (350,000+ views)
LinkedIn: Thoughts on leadership, AI, and what it takes to lead well at a senior level.
Newsletter: One practical leadership idea every week. Straight to your inbox.

Ready to find out where to focus first? 

You know something needs to change. I would love to have a conversation to see if I can help. Click below to book some time in my diary.

Fifteen minutes, no pressure. 

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