THE JUMPSTART STORY

I’m just about to launch Flux’s Jumpstart program. It culminates 28 years of professional development, starting age 18 with a reality TV show called “Troubleshooter.”

Just last week, a friend asked what got me to this point, so I made a cup of tea for us both and immediately thought of that day in Sixth Form.

Thanks to a teenage Ally McBeal addiction, I’d decided to be a lawyer. But my commerce teacher put a Troubleshooter video on in class, and I changed my mind.

We were watching what can best be described as a 90s precursor to Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, but for any industry. The show was hosted by Sir John Harvey-Jones (retired Chairman of ICI), who would sweep into ailing British companies, and flamboyantly prescribe strategic remedy, before returning months later to see if they’d flourished or flopped. Sir John’s record was remarkable.

I was immediately captivated by the concept of business transformation.

More than any other, that single day defined the direction of my career. I wanted to solve business problems.

After school, I did get a law degree, but instead of The Bar, I went to work at EY, the British Government, KPMG, Lloyds Banking Group, Deloitte and most recently, Accenture, to learn and drive transformations .

And not to cheapen those roles due to the length of a blog post, that sentence encapsulates almost three decades meeting some incredible people and working on the design and delivery of transformation projects at scale. In many cases, I led teams whose brief was to transform the transformations. However, those stories can wait for another day.

After leaving Accenture in 2023 to pursue a personal business idea, I was approached by two trusted clients to separately transform their ongoing projects, and established Flux Advisory to help them.

Most transformation projects start poorly, inevitably experiencing problems downstream, which is why the Flux team has developed Jumpstart.

I like to think of it as a "cut through" move, to be used at any stage of any transformation to start or bring it back on track.

Thank you Sir John Harvey-Jones  - you were an inspiration.

Thank you to Mark Gay, Brett Levin... and my amazing mentors Eric Wilson, Dr. Angela Coble, Denise Farmer, Paul Sainsbury and Jonathan Samuel.