Hello! I’m Sam,
Nice to Meet You.
Let’s start with a brief history
In 1998 I joined the Amazon start up team, then the business was only 6 months old and working there was exactly as insane as you might imagine. I was part of a 6 person project implementation team responsible for setting up the entire Distribution Operation.
An environment like this breeds its own entrepreneurs and many of the people I worked alongside went on to build or lead their own businesses. At some point, each of those businesses hit a wall, fast, with no time to figure it out, at this point they would ask themselves: who used to make this kind of pain disappear when we were at Amazon? ……..Well, that would be me.
Fast forward 20 odd years and I’ve continued to identifying and solve Distribution, Supply Chain and Strategic Operational challenges in businesses like Wickes and Dr Martens plus a long list of businesses small and large in between.
I might have a lofty title like Head of Change or Director of Transformation but the mission is always the same, read an organisation as a whole, surface what is genuinely holding progress back, and help teams to create structures and processes, at the same time as giving them the tools they need to create their own solutions for any future problem that comes their way.
This is me
What I see
Well generally it resembles an operation that’s quietly held together by workarounds, heroic individuals and a spreadsheet called FINAL_final_USE_THIS_ONE_v7 that everyone pretends not to be relying on and somehow a ‘temporary’ workaround from 2021 is now a business-critical process, owned entirely by one woman in Milton Keynes who has locked this spreadsheet down tighter than a celebrity super-injunction and refuses to explain why cell H47 should never be touched.
Supply Chain Implementation at DM’s
Some light team building before a day of problem solving at Wickes
My point is, that the stated problem is rarely the whole story, good intention and simple solutions to seemingly simple problems often become stuck because too many things are tangled together: process, technology, behaviour, incentives, capacity, politics, history and fear.
My role? Is to help separate the noise from the reality and create a business environment that is able to optimise business processes, developing meaningful and lasting solutions that the entire business can believe in and implement.
Oh and also to find out why
What people say about working with me
“12 years ago we worked with Sam during a period of restructuring our business and management team, she transformed the way we thought about our business and clients putting CX at the heart of the business, turning MHI from "just post" to a "clients choice" business.
She provided an objective approach to delivering a programme of operational changes that are still benefiting the business today....”
CEO - Mail Handling International (MHI) and Bascom.
“Sam’s approach to transformation reflects her wealth of experience and passion for driving successful change. Hers is not an ‘out of the box’ approach, but a wide range of tools and techniques to help you guide people through the process, concentrating on what's important to get the best out of your people.
Sam is tremendously supportive yet will also challenge your thinking and push you beyond your comfort zone. In those instances, it’s easy to want to choose the easy out, or even avoid altogether, but with Sam’s dedicated support we faced those challenges together and came out stronger.”
Head of Transformation - Watson Marlow Manufacturing Part of Spirax Sarco Group
A small selection of the businesses in which I’ve both learned and applied my skills over the past 30 years.
“Sam's role in managing and co-ordinating a group of dispersed subject-experts required her to continually focus the team mindset on the delivery of complex outcomes in a changing environment, and her mastery of the different facets of these roles was impressive.
This was enhanced further by her empathetic and enthusiastic personality, which enabled her to quickly and smoothly assimilate a diverse set of personalities, including senior academics and executives, into a congruent team”
Senior Academic (lawyer and magistrate) - Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA).
