Story
I’m the person
I couldn’t find.
Dyslexic, and told at eight that I would never amount to anything. Mum of two. Seven years at J.P. Morgan, to VP. Trained over three thousand people. Built an audience of thirty-one thousand from nothing, and closed the tech side on my own terms. Every one of those would have been faster with somebody in my corner, and most of the time there wasn’t one.
Where it starts
Primary school. My teachers, to my face.
You are not smart enough to be anything.
You will always fail at reading and writing.
You are not working hard enough.
I’m dyslexic. They kept me in at break and lunch to practise. They made me read out loud to the class, knowing exactly what would happen. They sat me spelling tests and had me say my answers to the room.
I was working harder than anyone in that class. It just wasn’t going anywhere.
And here is the thing
You repeat what you know.
Breaking the cycle means trying something new. And you cannot try something new until somebody hands you what new looks like.
Nobody handed it to me. So I kept doing the only thing I knew, harder, and got the same result, and drew the obvious conclusion about myself.
That is the entire reason this business exists.
Not advice. Not encouragement. Somebody in the room who can see what you cannot, and hand you the thing you would never have reached for on your own.
What actually happened
Everything they said I couldn’t do, I did.
People say things to fit you into a box. The limitation is usually their imagination, not your ability.
It was always in me to do those things. It would simply have happened a lot faster with one person in my corner, deleting the narratives that had no evidence behind them.
Then the working world
I learn by doing. Corporate wanted me to learn by reading.
Which made everything harder than it needed to be. It felt like a fight, in a shape that didn’t suit me, and eventually like a fight I wasn’t going to win.
Until I worked out something that took me far too long. As you grow and change, the place that fitted you yesterday stops fitting. That isn’t failure. That’s information.
So I got to know myself properly, and moved to the roles that fitted the person I had become rather than the one I was hired as.
Which is why
The first thing I go after is the story you’re telling yourself.
I listen to how you talk about yourself. Then I ask the questions that make you say the narrative out loud, and we go looking for the evidence together.
Usually there isn’t any. And these things don’t vanish in two seconds. But every time you say one out loud and put a fact where it used to sit, you operate with more confidence, more conviction and more clarity than you did the week before.
Yours probably isn’t dyslexia. But you know exactly which sentence I mean, and you probably know who said it to you.
Seven years at J.P. Morgan
I learned how senior rooms actually work.
Delivering change nobody wanted, into teams who had every reason to resist it.
Problem solving in front of clients where being wrong was expensive and being quiet was worse.
Sitting across the table from Managing Directors with thirty-five years on me, and having to hold the space anyway.
Trained, in rooms and on stages, including plenty who knew more about the topic than I did.
That last one is the lesson. You walk on, you hold your head up, and you trust that your voice will land with the people who need to hear it. It took me years to believe that.
The one that nearly finished me
They wanted me in the business, and wanted to change everything about who I was.
It took me years to recover and get back to being me. Confidence in your own voice is not a personality trait. It can be taken off you, and it can be built back.
Which is why I never take anyone’s self-belief lightly. I have watched mine go, and I know exactly what it takes to get it back.
The part of me they wanted to file down is the part worth paying for.
I see things fresh, because I am not from your industry, not on your payroll, and not attached to how it has always been done. I will not follow the herd and I will not run a textbook process at you. An impartial view, real experience, plain logic, and movement.
The thing companies most like to squash in people is usually the exact thing that breaks a cycle of “this isn’t working”.
Then I kept moving
Banking. Software sales. COO of a recruitment agency. Rec tech. This.
I have never been frightened of moving. People grow and change, and the honest thing is to move with it rather than hide from it and call that loyalty.
Every one of those was an industry I had not worked in. That turns out to be the actual skill.
No job description, no territory, no pipeline.
I was the first person they hired in the UK. There were no roles and responsibilities to inherit, so I built them. Business development, sales, marketing and the pitch itself, in a software market I had never operated in.
Built the region from zero.
A stuck business, and an industry I’d never worked in.
I met it exactly where it was, took it apart, and rebuilt how it ran. Including the hiring model, and the calls nobody enjoys making.
Three times the revenue in six months.
At every one of those turns, what I actually needed was an impartial voice. Someone to sanity check me. Someone with nothing to gain who wanted me to win.
Building my own
I launched into an arena I had never worked in, and won hearts and minds.
A tech business, from nothing, in a market I did not come from. A training academy, clients from start-ups to $100m businesses, and an audience of thirty-one thousand built from zero over four years.
Then closing it
The market moved, and I had fallen out of love with it.
That is a very hard sentence to say out loud, especially when your name is on the thing. I closed the tech, refunded clients, and walked away on my own terms before it limped.
The audience didn’t go anywhere. Thirty-one thousand people are still there, because they were never buying the software. That tells you something about what actually holds people.
It took more courage than building it did.
And in the middle of all of it
Becoming a mum while running a business looked easy on TikTok.
People kept telling me that if I just got more organised I could take it all on. The truth was a limited number of hours and a million competing demands, and I was drowning in every one of them.
I did get organised. Not copy-paste organised, out of somebody else’s system. Gabi organised, built round my actual life.
I am also a professional member of the 3am club. Lying there processing, solving, going round in circles on my own. Well, I was, until I built a way to break the cycle. That way is now the business.
Also
Our local school needed to raise money and couldn’t get anyone to come with them. So I jumped in.
I don’t sit and watch. That’s the whole of it, really.
Why this exists
Don’t collect the scars I did.
Every turn in my career, every stall in my business, every 3am, would have been shorter with one impartial person in the room. Someone with nothing to gain, who wanted me to win, and who would tell me the truth without dressing it up.
Sitting in silence will never get you where you are meant to be, and it will not fix the thing keeping you awake tonight.
Speak your truth and move.
