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, and EMCC Senior Practitioner accreditation. But if you want to know whether we're a good fit, the best place to start is a conversation.
