Alice's Blog Posts

Who do you work with, what is that like for you/them and how do you help?

What are you most passionate about/what gives you the most energy? 

What do you feel like when a client has made a positive change?

What do you do in your spare time? 

Matthew's Blog Posts

Who do you work with, what is that like for you/them and how do you help?

Coaching: I coach Founders, leaders and leadership teams in thinking, re-thinking, shifting, growing, readying, shaping, trust-building and accountability-partnering. This helps leaders, teams and companies move and create momentum toward what matters most to them. It helps them discover, uncover and move through aspects that may be holding them back or tripping them up.

Advising / Guiding: I provide Board and C-level advisory services with a particular advisory focus on a key capital asset - human capital (your people)! These include in-gagement, people experience strategy (especially at points of crisis or inflection), org design and re-design, succession progression and creating learning companies to advance clarity, safety and innovation . I love helping companies create the circumstances for belonging, fulfilment, resilience and high-achievement.

Facilitating: I facilitate key meetings, workshops, offsites (strategic/team/Board), retreats in groups and teams to reach desired outcomes. I've designed and facilitated leadership journeys, conflict resolution meetings and founder coaching circles.

What are you most passionate about/what gives you the most energy?

I am passionate about listening, thinking and sense-making with Founders (and their leadership teams), Boards, VCs and Investors.  I love working with Founder-led companies who are well-funded or readying to fund again. My most fulfilling work is alongside leaders, teams and companies experiencing complexity, change, growth, pivot or consolidation.  Partnering with them in awareness and getting from where they are to where they want to be, is such a thrill. 

What do you feel like when a client has made a positive change?

This work is a tremendously humbling opportunity to constantly re-think, learn and stretch. Clients' positive change sometimes feels like a deep, grounded, full gratitude and with other clients it feels like a collectively joyful high-five in your heart. A breakthrough in leadership teams can feel like the coming together of a well-tuned sports team to deliver a win. Moving through conflict in generative ways can feel like a weight is lifted with clarity, connection  and momentum restored. 

What do you do in your spare time

I've travelled and love travelling to ocean dive, ski, hike, climb and eat.  The things I value most are my family (amongst whom I include my friends and pets), my health, spending time in nature and constantly learning. My daily and weekly practices to sustain resilience include meditation (for 30 years), boxing, yoga, reading, creating, walking my dogs and connecting with those I love. 

Nick's Blog Posts

In founding Alembic I embarked fully on a lifelong passion to help people, linking my upbringing in meditation and Tai Chi with my career in company and M&A advisory work. Bringing these two things together means a focus on supporting ambitious business leaders with lots of problems to solve.

Who do you work with, what is that like for you/them and how do you help?

I work with the CEO's, senior leaders and investors in large family and privately owned businesses. In our clients people are bonded by their shared history and commitments, sometimes very deeply within family businesses. Although they are bound together, they are often apart: stuck in situations that can be repetitive, deeply frustrating, stressful, confusing, and perhaps even frightening.

What are you most passionate about/what gives you the most energy?

My deepest pleasure lies in helping them rediscover and then build upon the threads of communication and the threads of their lives, helping them find the courage and method to talk through their challenges and find agreement, direction, and renewed energy to move on to wherever that leads. At the lighter end of this, it means bringing alignment on major strategic options and a new binding narrative for a leadership team that needs strategic clarity and energy. At it's most challenging it can involve fixing families broken by the stresses of being in business together.

Being with my family and helping where I can in their lives. At work, my passion and flow comes in resolving the most complex and deep seated relational issues and seeing people grow in so many ways as they do this.

What do you do in your spare time?

I love history, psychology, cycling, Chi Gong, Tai Chi and these days, Vajra. I love walking, especially the line between the land and sea, and my guilty pleasure is the poetry of Kate Bush. I watch movies of any sort, and have a Masters Degree in the Psychology and Neuroscience of Mental Health and a Masters Degree in history, both of which are ongoing active interests.

I am a fellow Director of Alembic, and have worked alongside Nick since the business was founded.  I am also a Depth Coach and work with developing professionals and leaders who are open to self reflection and personal discovery work.

I value everyone having the opportunity to cultivate self-leadership and I work to motivate and inspire my colleagues in exploring new ideas and visioning.  Together we explore how the resources they already have inside and around themselves support them and how to develop new resources.

My coaching work is focussed primarily on helping to deepen self-awareness, bringing insights which inspire growth and empowered resilience. I work from an embodied and actively creative approach so that change is not just understood by the mind but also learned by the muscle memory. 

I love my life and our business and I want to support others in feeling that way about their own life and work.

Who do you work with, what is that like for you/them and how do you help?

I work with senior leaders and teams to help them perform optimally. My coaching motto is, ‘You can’t fire a canon from a canoe.’ In other words, I see my work as ensuring that my clients have all the mental resources, insights and abilities that they need in order to achieve whatever their goals are.  

For me, it is always a great pleasure to work with new individuals and teams because helping people to be better versions of themselves gives meaning and purpose to my working life. I consider it the greatest pleasure and honour to be able to share the journey of change and growth with my clients.

For my clients, I suspect that they find it challenging but ultimately rewarding. I balance the appropriate levels of challenge and support. Both are critical as the challenge enables growth and the support allows my client to know that I am ultimately on their side and that we are working together for their goal.

To help I call on many thousands of hours of therapy practice as well as coaching. My therapy background allows insights into my clients’ emotions and thinking patterns and I use coaching techniques and exercises to help them overcome their challenges. I am also a certified Business Psychologist and so have extensive understanding of how people in organisations thrive and what may hold them back.

What are you most passionate about/what gives you the most energy?

Still after many thousands of client-hours of cognitive hypnotherapy, EMDR and coaching it still gives me a thrill to watch people transform, to be better than they were before we began working together.  

I am energised by those clients who bring lots of energy to their journey. The clients who are keen to grow and transform and who really engage in the work bring out the best in me.

What do you feel like when a client has made a positive change?

It is truly the greatest feeling. I always have in mind that I am not just helping my client, but I am helping everyone that they come into contact with.

In some cases, it’s not just colleagues who benefit, but friends, spouses, children; and sometimes, even the children they haven’t had yet!!  

What do you do in your spare time?

In my spare time I absolutely love Thai boxing despite the recurring injuries! I am also on a mission to get my ability to play tennis to match my love and enthusiasm for the game.

Who do you work with, what is that like for you/them and how do you help?

I work with leaders and their teams to reconnect with their own individualities and strengths and help them create a shared group identity. I help them identify their priorities and goals and support them in crafting plans and implementing frameworks to achieve them. I use a number of tools and disciplines (including coaching, project management, strategy and facilitation) to support them during the transition, which is often the most uncomfortable part of the transformation journey.

What are you most passionate about/what gives you the most energy?

I am passionate about transformation - both personal and organizational. I believe that individuals and companies have the ability and the power to change for the better and become more complete, effective and ultimately happy. Supporting my clients in discovering who they are and what they really want by helping them access their geniuses energizes me and rewards me.

What do you feel like when a client has made a positive change?

When clients get new insights and move forward, I feel pure joy and happiness! Their success is my success too. Knowing I contributed to my clients’ empowerment gives me a sense of satisfaction, fulfilled purpose and belonging. My clients’ achievements fuel my passion and love for my work. I also feel incredibly grateful as every client journey, struggle and success gives me the opportunity to deepen my own experience of the world, learn new things and get different perspectives which all contribute to making me a richer human being.

What do you do in your spare time?

Outside work, I love traveling and visiting new places, walking in nature and spending time with my family. I strongly believe that anyone can be successful in both their professional and personal life by integrating the skills they both require and without sacrificing any of the two. Ah, and I love eating in company trying new food and having new culinary experiences!