I'm a customer experience and marketing consultant. Twenty years in, across B2C and B2B, a lot of sectors. The work I do now is helping businesses figure out what their customer actually wants and needs, then shaping the proposition around that so the value exchange is real on both sides.

The honest version of how I got here is that I had people take their time to teach me the whole way through my career, generously, across those twenty years. So when I was setting up my own consultancy I wanted to be the person who did that for the next generation. That's most of why I'm here.

I work in partnership with my clients, usually as an extension of their team. Customer experience is a hard thing to bring into a business, so I tend to get brought in for odd reasons, which suits me fine.

Broccoli, yes. You need it, it's good for you, and nobody's thrilled about it in the moment.

Nobody really knows how to bring customer experience into a business, so people come to me with a symptom. My campaigns aren't working, I'm not getting traction, my LinkedIn leads have dried up. And the answer they're expecting is never the answer I give, because if your LinkedIn campaigns aren't working, the reality is your LinkedIn campaigns aren't going to work. The real questions are underneath: what does the customer actually need, what value proposition did they really want, which channel even makes sense.

So they come in with one symptom and I usually end up explaining there's a fundamental issue in the business model or the go-to-market. They didn't come with that problem in mind. The hardest version is a bootstrapped founder who's poured their life into a dream, and you have to gently say this might be an idea, not a business yet, and the only difference between those two things is a customer. I've hated some of those calls. But people come back later and say it helped, that they went away and did the work. You don't always get to feel like a hero.

I tell them they're asking the wrong question. People come in with what do I do about AI, what do I do about this tool, that platform. That's not the game changer. Don't get distracted by the emperor's new clothes.

Get your vision, your objectives and your strategy in place first, then ask what enables them. The tools support the strategy, they don't replace it. The other half of it never changes: the customer has to be in your head more than you're in your own head. You can build something beautiful that no customer wants to pay for. So before the tooling conversation, I'm always pulling people back to why would anyone care about this, why would anyone buy it, am I solving a problem for the market or just a problem I personally wanted to solve.

Apply if a stranger's problem genuinely lights you up, and if you can sit in someone's emotional, sensitive moment, when they've put everything into a business, and challenge their thinking without it landing as an attack. That takes real emotional intelligence. You have to read the body language and know when to push and when to hold back.

The number one thing, for mentor and mentee both, is listen. Actively listen, be prepared, articulate the situation, and don't come in with a closed mind. The trap in thirty minutes is panic mode, where you're rushing to dump information and they're rushing to throw every problem at you at once. I always say up front: this is thirty minutes, book more sessions if you need them, but let's break it down and not throw everything at the wall. If you can take the script out of it and genuinely listen, you're a good mentor.