Why I do this work and why it matters to me personally

I want to start with something many consultants do not often say: I did not come to this work through a polished corporate path or a textbook leadership career. I came to it through experience - years spent working inside businesses, managing people, watching what helps teams thrive and what quietly gets in the way.

At one point, after a difficult chapter in my own career, I found myself looking back over two decades of work and recognising a pattern: Again and again, I had seen capable founders and business owners carrying far too much of the people side of the business on their own shoulders.

They cared deeply, but had never really been shown how to lead that part of the business well and had ended up holding it together through instinct, effort and sheer force of will. That is the work I felt drawn to.

So let me take you back to the beginning.

The job I lost

Just over a year before I started my own business, I was working for a small company where the owner had unexpectedly found herself responsible for the people side of the business. It was a role her husband had always held before he retired. She had not planned for it and she did not want it.

She was a passionate founder, suddenly out of her depth on the people side, making decisions from pressure and fear rather than clarity. The team felt it and so did her customers. When the people side breaks down, it always changes the experience you deliver to the people you are meant to serve.

In the middle of that, she let me go. I was sad more than angry, because I could see exactly what was happening and the cost it was imposing on her. And in the months and years that followed, I started to notice the same pattern in so many other businesses: capable founders carrying a part of the business they had never really been prepared for.

The moment everything changed

Not long after that, I found myself in a role where the way things were run on the people side went against almost everything I believed about how to treat a team. I will spare you the full story, but I will share what I decided the day I walked out.

First, that this was not how work had to feel and that I would not put myself in that position again. Second, that I wanted to spend my career helping leaders create workplaces where people could do good work without having to endure the kinds of experiences I had seen up close - on both sides.

Those two decisions have quietly shaped everything I have done since.

The pattern I kept seeing

Over more than twenty years working inside small businesses - across marketing, sales, operations and management - I kept seeing the same thing. The businesses that felt strongest were not always the ones with the best product or the biggest ambition. They were the ones where people understood their roles, worked well together and were being led with clarity.

And when things felt hard, it was rarely because the founder did not care enough. More often, it was because they had built something brilliant and then found themselves carrying a part of the business they had never really been prepared for: managing people, holding the team together, dealing with tensions and trying to create structure while still running everything else.

Again and again, I met founders who had hired people to help the business grow, only to find themselves with more complexity, more conversations, more meetings and less headspace than before. They did not need more pressure to become “better managers” overnight. They needed the right kind of support around the people side of the business.

That was the gap I kept seeing — and the one I decided to fill.

Why me

The more time I spent working with business owners, the clearer it became that this is the world I care about most: founder‑led, values‑driven businesses where people have poured their energy and judgment into building something real. Those are also the businesses where founders often feel the most stretched on the people side.

That’s where I decided to focus. The world needs more brilliant, human businesses and fewer founders who feel they are holding everything together alone.

I bring two things to this work that are genuinely rare in combination.

First, structure. I am methodical by nature. I thrive on diagnostics, clear thinking and practical plans. I am not interested in advice that sounds good in a workshop but evaporates by Monday morning; I want things to work in the real rhythm of your business.

Second, humanity. I have been the employee in a broken team, the person who was not listened to and the manager trying to make things work without enough support. I understand, from the inside, what it costs when the people side of a business is neglected and I bring that understanding into the way I work with you and your team.

Currently based in Somerset, I work with founder-led product brand founders across the UK who are ready to stop being the only ones holding everything together.

If any of this resonates, let's have a conversation.

© Copyright 2026. Claudia D. Thompson. All Rights Reserved.

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