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

I want to start with something I don't see many business consultants admit.

I didn't arrive at this work through a glittering corporate career or an MBA. I arrived here through a firing, a difficult experience that made me want to be sick and a moment of sitting at my kitchen table looking back at twenty years of work and finally seeing the pattern.

But let me start at the beginning.

The job I lost

Just over a year before I started my own business, I was working for a small business whose owner had unexpectedly found herself running the people side of the company - a role her husband had held before he retired. She wasn't ready for it. She didn't want it. And instead of seeing what I could offer to help her carry it, she felt threatened. So she let me go.

I wasn't angry. I was sad - because I could see exactly what was happening and exactly what it was costing her. A good business owner, out of her depth on the people side, making decisions from fear instead of clarity. I'd go on to see that same pattern hundreds of times.

The moment everything changed

A little later I found myself in a role where my boss made my working life genuinely miserable. I won't dwell on the details, but I will tell you what I decided the day I walked out.

Two things:

First: nobody will ever treat me like that again.

Second: I'm going to spend my career making sure other people don't have to go through it either.

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

The pattern I kept seeing

Over more than twenty years working inside small and medium businesses - across marketing, sales, operations and management - I kept seeing the same thing.

The jobs I loved? Always came down to a great boss and a team that worked. The roles where I struggled? Almost always traced back to a leader who hadn't figured out the people side.

When I eventually moved into business coaching, I started speaking to owner after owner who had never planned to be a boss. They'd built something brilliant, hired people to help them grow and then found themselves drowning in the very thing that was supposed to make their life easier.

And I noticed something that most coaching and consultancy quietly skips over: the communication piece. The conversations that haven't happened. The expectations that were never made clear. The structure that exists in the owner's head but nowhere else.

That's the gap nobody was filling. So I decided to fill it.

Why me

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

The first is structure. I'm methodical by nature - I like diagnostics, frameworks and clear plans. I don't believe in vague advice that sounds good in a workshop and disappears by Monday morning.

The second is humanity. I've been the employee in a broken team. I've been the person nobody listened to. I understand - from the inside - what it costs when the people side of a business gets neglected. And I bring that understanding into every conversation I have with a client and every member of their team.

I'm based in Somerset and work with small business owners across the UK - typically with teams of five to twenty people who are ready to stop being the bottleneck in their own company.

If any of this resonates, I'd love to have a conversation.

Or start with the free Owner-Dependency Scorecard. It takes five minutes and tells you exactly where to begin.

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

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