From humble beginnings Putting my community first is something that has been instilled into me since I was a child. My parents left their home in Ireland to set up a new life in London in 1978. We weren’t welcome in most places as a minority, but this never deterred my dad from making valuable connections. He was a workaholic and often brought me with him to work on weekends, sometimes with the bribe of watching an Arsenal game. The key takeaway from that experience was witnessing how my dad created connections with those around him. As a retail banker, he was a lender to the whole of North London. He’d go off every weekend to meet people in and around the area, whether that be a family-run pizza place or the local carpentry business, he was always doing business proposals and seeing how else he could service the community. I grew up seeing my dad bringing all these different kinds of people into a community, and serving them by giving more than he was taking. So, when I got into contract recruitment and interim management it was the perfect fit for me - bringing people together and being able to link them to business problems was an easy thing to do and something I enjoyed immensely, thanks to him. Creating Sullivan & Stanley’s Change Society When large businesses are in need of consulting services and capabilities, they tend to either go to recruitment firms or management consultancies. I was on the recruitment side, and as the years went on, it became clear that the traditional recruitment model wasn’t as rewarding as it once was and was quickly becoming a race to the bottom. I saw this as an opportunity to work with boards and offer them a bespoke offering by crowdsourcing the best talent I had on hand. The elixir of interim management is that these senior change agents aren’t enticed by permanent positions anymore and are looking for freedom and flexibility. Most have grown weary of navigating the political complexities within corporate organisations. Their aspiration is to join a company, exchange intellectual property, facilitate knowledge transfer, collaborate with permanent staff, enhance their skills, drive transformation, and eventually make an exit. Over the years, I’ve witnessed a massive drain of some of the best talent in the corporate world, particularly in leadership, executive change and transformation roles, which has led to a significant shift in the executive and leadership tiers within organisations. So for me, it was a no brainer. I saw a massive opportunity to create an organisation that harnessed the best of interim management and consulting, whilst neutralising the fallacies of interim management. That's where Sullivan & Stanley’s Change Society came from, which was inverting my black book of 1000 of the best freelance interim managers and change practitioners with years of client-side experience across a range of sectors. I'd gotten to know these people who had resourced and managed over 100 successful transformations - these were the foundation. The idea was to unite them via a community approach to consulting, where we'd be able to neutralise all the fallibilities of being an independent to actually have a proper community, something that could compete as a workforce model against ‘The Big Four’ whilst also designing a methodology of how to transform businesses using that workforce model. I was brought up by my father to understand that it’s a long game for relationships. So, I made several of the members equity partners, and then we went to work. Inspiring the future of work The Change Society has over 1000 members, and over the last seven years we’ve gone from strength to strength. We have around 100 people
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