Kate Smith - my story…
I started my career in marketing, but the version of marketing I fell in love with was never really about products. My first roles were in technology transfer, connecting universities, companies, and graduates, and then in environmental initiatives. The thread running through all of it was people: how they connect, what motivates them, what they need to do their best work. Marketing, at its heart, used to be about understanding people. I've spent the rest of my career trying not to lose sight of that.
In 2003 I joined one of the world's leading publishers, and over the next two decades I built teams, led through restructures, and navigated culture shifts. I worked inside some of the most energising leadership teams I've ever encountered - the kind where you leave meetings feeling ten feet tall - and some genuinely dysfunctional ones that taught me at least as much, just considerably less enjoyably. Both were invaluable, and both shaped how I think.
What I kept observing, year after year, was the difference between teams that performed and teams that struggled. The gap was never process or resource. It was trust, whether people felt safe enough to be honest, to challenge, to ask for help. And yet so much organisational energy went into everything except building that.
I also experienced this from a deeply personal perspective. I had two daughters and navigated two returns to work, in an organisation where the unspoken rules about what that meant for your career were often louder than anything written in a policy. I saw talented women make choices they shouldn't have had to make, and I became quietly determined to do something about it.
Eventually, the pull to help more people - beyond one organisation, beyond one team - became impossible to ignore. I founded We Are Firestarter because I believe you shouldn't have to choose between a high-performing culture and one where people actually want to stay. In practice that means diagnostic work to understand what's actually going on beneath the surface, team development, and facilitated programmes designed to shift behaviour in ways that stick. It is grounded, commercial work, informed by 25 years of knowing what it feels like to be inside the system you're trying to change.
I now work with leadership teams, HR leaders, and organisations navigating complexity. I also hold a Visiting Industrial Fellowship at Oxford Brookes University, because I think the conversation between practice and research matters, and I want to be part of it.
I bring 25 years of commercial leadership experience, an MBA, a Masters in Coaching and Mentoring, Postgraduate Psychology and HR qualifications d ICF PCC and EMCC Senior Practitioner coaching accreditations. But if you want to know whether we're a good fit, the best place to start is a conversation.
Fiona Wilkinson - my story…
I spent the first part of my career at Visa, which sounds like a straightforward corporate trajectory until you consider that I joined in 1982 and left in 2016, and in that time the payments industry transformed almost beyond recognition. I grew up professionally inside that complexity, moving from marketing into a multi-country acceptance role, then running Visa UK as Managing Director, and eventually joining the executive committee as Chief Communication Officer. That last role meant steering the business through a very significant moment: navigating a complex sale process while protecting the company's reputation and keeping people focused. It was not a quiet time.
What I kept noticing throughout all of it was that the conversations that actually moved things forward were never the big set-piece ones. They were the one-to-one ones, often the ones people were slightly nervous to have. I was known, I think, for listening, really listening, to what someone needed rather than what they said they needed. Those conversations were the part of the job I found most energising, and eventually I started to wonder whether I should be doing more of them on purpose.
After Visa I worked with early-stage businesses, sat on the board of a fintech as a non-executive director, chaired Speakers Trust, a charity that gives young people public speaking skills and, with it, confidence, and volunteered as a SHOUT crisis counsellor. The thread through all of it was the same: people trying to find their footing, and the difference a good conversation made.
Coaching was the obvious next step. The MSc at Henley gave me the rigorous framework to match the instincts I'd built over decades, and the ICF and EMCC accreditations hold me to a standard I care about. I now work with leaders who are stepping into bigger roles, carrying more complexity, or both. I bring real-world boardroom experience to those conversations, which means I understand the terrain my clients are navigating without needing it explained. The questions come from that place, and so does the challenge.
The privilege of this work is watching someone see their situation differently and decide, on their own terms, to do something about it. That never gets old.
Diane Law - my story…
I have spent more than thirty years in people development, building L&D functions, designing programmes, and learning what actually delivers results, and what just looks good on paper. I began as a management consultant in 1987, designing bespoke training for clients including Shell, BP, Zurich Re and Glaxo. From there I directed my own consultancy for fifteen years (Activate CS, supporting organisations such as Parliament, the University of Oxford, BP and Swiss Re), held internal roles at AEA Technology and Oxford Brookes, and spent six years at Newton Europe, ending as Head of People Development.
While there I won Training Journal's Leadership Development Programme of the Year in 2018. Since 2019 I have run my own consultancy, working as a fractional Head of People Development for scale-up and established organisations alike.
A degree in psychology and an MBA from Warwick gave me two lenses that have shaped my work ever since: how people actually learn, and what businesses actually need. The combination matters. Over the decades I have seen learning interventions go wrong in predictable ways: programmes launched without stakeholder alignment, coaching signed off without clear objectives, and off-the-shelf courses bought because they were available rather than because they were right. My response has been to build the opposite: bespoke, in-the-flow-of-work development, designed with an organisation and its people rather than handed down to them, and built wherever possible from what's already working rather than starting from scratch.
What I hear most often from clients is that I bring values and ethics to the work as much as technical skill, and that I get to the heart of what's actually needed. My measure of a job done well is straightforward: the organisation I've worked with becomes self-sufficient and no longer needs me, because the change was built to stick, not to depend on me.
Nina Pattani- my story…
For most of my adult life I have worked alongside professional women navigating careers that look successful from the outside. First as a colleague and business owner in healthcare, and now also as a coach whose practice sits almost entirely with them.
I trained as a clinical pharmacist, then opened Fairlop Pharmacy with my family, where I have led as director and lead pharmacist for over a decade. Building a business from scratch taught me things clinical training never could: how to lead a team collaboratively under real financial and time pressure; how to hold a coaching culture inside a fast-paced, process-heavy environment; how to prioritise my own aliveness and how to keep making aligned decisions when the personal and the professional are inseparable.
That experience led me to coaching. Alongside the pharmacy I completed my formal coaching qualifications, and now work almost entirely with professional women in healthcare between their mid-thirties and mid-forties. These are women who have built successful careers and lives, and who want to feel successful on their own terms. Often they are high achieving women, caught between cultures, or stuck in a way of being that no longer fits, and they are ready to break the mould. I bring somatic and nature-based practices alongside classic coaching when it helps them reconnect with what actually matters to them.
What draws me to this work is a long-standing fascination with how we relate authentically, what really drives the decisions we make, and how heavily professional, societal and cultural expectations sit on women's health and wellbeing. Change is hard, and life gets on top of all of us. My job is to help women find clarity, spot the patterns they can't see for themselves, and generate options for a brighter, healthier future on their own terms. Most of them have wonderful stories to tell along the way. I love hearing them. People over process, always.
