We believe an ethical approach improves outcomes.

Every transformation story, it seems, has its moment. Mine was COVID.

I'd spent a decade in big consulting, working on what I genuinely believed was impactful. That was the language we used. That was the work I thought we were doing. And then we all packed up our laptops, went home, and something shifted.

Without the water cooler, without the cadence of the office, without the shared rituals that had made the culture feel real — the kool-aid started to wear off. The veneer got thinner. I started to see the actual drivers of the organisation, and they weren't the ones in the pitch decks.

So I did what seemed obvious. I left. But I didn't leave to start Ethicol. I jumped to another big consulting firm, convinced the problem had been that particular place and not the shape of the work itself. I hadn't really reflected on why I was walking away from the first one — I just knew I needed out. I told myself this one would be better.

Day one, I knew I'd made a mistake. It still took me two years and a redundancy to actually do something about it.

When the redundancy came, I hadn't planned my next move. What I knew was that I owed my clients honesty — I needed to let them know I was leaving. In the course of a single week, three of them said the same thing: great, we'll just contract you directly to do this new project.