ABOUT ME
About me
I’m Sally Purdie. For 20 years in STEM, I was the person handed the problems no one else could fix: the failing change programme, the bid that kept losing, the team that wasn’t performing. I fixed them.
In 2018 I left the corporate world and set up my consultancy a year later. It wasn’t a career pivot; it was the same work, on my own terms, because the people I’d worked with kept asking me to do exactly what I’d always done for them. The difference is that now I also fix the systemic problems that made the work so hard in the first place.
How I got here
I’m a Chartered Engineer (CEng) and Fellow of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (IOM3). I spent my early career at Rolls-Royce and went on to hold senior R&D and innovation roles at the National Physical Laboratory, Procter & Gamble, and Element Six. These roles involved running large international R&D teams, leading company-wide change programmes, managing innovation portfolios, setting up quality systems from scratch, and delivering products and technologies to market across many sectors.
In 2016 I took over the strategy and delivery of the business case for a national fusion programme that had been languishing for nearly a decade. I led it to the point where it secured £86M in government funding.
But I was done – not with the work, but with the cost of doing it inside organisations that were never built for people like me.
Having spent nearly ten years writing as a hobby, I treated myself to a mid-life gap year and went back to Uni to study creative writing while I figured out what to do next. As well as gaining a distinction, I won the United Agents’ prize for Most Promising Writer and realised that building creativity had a halo effect on all my professional endeavours.
Now I work to apply the hard-won experience and play with all the varied strings to my bow.
Why both
People ask why one consultancy does change-delivery, bid writing, and coaching. The longer I’ve worked this way, the more I realise they’re the same problem from different angles: a funding bid that loses, a REF impact case study that doesn’t land, a mid-career engineer who walks away. In every case, someone had the substance but struggled to get the impact they deserved.
I also believe that creativity and science aren’t competitors; we need both if we’re to solve the problems that face us and the world.
How I work
I’m direct, evidence-based, and I don’t polish things that don’t deserve it. I’ll tell you if your bid isn’t fundable before you waste six months on it. Early on, I got a lot of feedback that I was too direct. So I went looking for what I thought of as an engineer’s guide to emotional intelligence, and trained as a Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) practitioner. What it actually taught me was how to work on myself: to notice whether I’m challenging someone constructively or just annoying them, and to get a point across without driving a wedge. The most useful person to work on, it turned out, was me.
More recently, I realised the only bit I missed from my old roles was working with people to develop themselves. I kept on being asked to do it, but as this wasn’t part of my business I only felt I could do so informally. In 2025, I went back to Henley Business School and trained as a coach.
The personal bit
When I eventually built my own business, I built it around the life I wanted, rather than fitting the life around the work. I’ve worked part-time and compressed hours in both the corporate world and my own business, so I know first-hand what flexible working gives you – and what you need to think about before doing it.
In my early years at Rolls-Royce, I hit every goal I’d set myself, and found them strangely empty, because I’d left no room for a life around them. It quietly changed what I optimised for, even if it took me years to act on it fully.
In 2024 I had cancer. I came through it. I kept waiting for the moment of clarity about what I’d change – and it never came. I eventually understood why: I’d already made those changes. It turns out, I’d been listening to myself all along.
It’s why I care as much about the life around the work as the work itself. When I coach, I’m not just interested in your next promotion. I’m also interested in whether you’re building the life you actually want.
These days I put all these principles into action – striving to fulfil all my craziest ambitions, and keeping plenty of space for the people and things I love, not just the day job.