‘It’s lonely at the top’ might strike you as a terrible cliché, however it is important that it is used. As we mark the start of Mental Health Awareness Week in the UK (May 9–16), which takes ‘loneliness’ as its 2022 theme, it’s clear the pressure faced by CEOs is quite unique.

Let’s start by acknowledging that there is a flipside to the rewards that come with success. I often find that the people I work with have business challenges that are totally consuming – whether it’s strategy, operations, people, growth – everything they do is at the lack of themselves.

CEOs are so ingrained into their business that their own needs simply aren’t met. It can be easy to forget that you’re only one person, and like everyone else, human. In the last two years alone, modern leadership has been under intense scrutiny. Tough decisions have been made during a period of immense transition. As we emerge out of the Covid-19 crisis, there has been little time to process what has taken place. Loneliness, grief, and the personal impact of leading through an unforgiving global pandemic have created the potential for a legacy of loneliness unless you can navigate a path back to yourself.

It may come as a surprise that the tools and strategies I equip modern leaders with for personal growth to deal with these situations are taken from my arts background. I learnt the art of clowning from the masters in Italy. From this, I instil key lessons that in essence can be defined as ‘work well, play harder’. Creativity, kindness, acceptance and play are all key ingredients in my coaching toolkit, and I always start at the same point: Be seen.

This must start with vulnerability. Being open and vulnerable with yourself and your senior leadership team is made much easier when you share your own stories and challenges.

Tell the truth
Faced with an unprecedented number of unknowns, I remember during the pandemic I was approached by a CEO of a multi-billion-pound company in the financial sector. Like many, she was inundated with questions from staff for direction on the return to work. I spoke to her, and she told me how lonely she felt. My advice was simple. ‘Tell the truth’, I said. She then explained to her staff that she did not know what was happening, while explaining what she thought might happen. This shift to vulnerable communication led to the most positive staff response she had ever experienced.

Being proactive with personal growth is so important. It avoids overwhelm, which in turn leads to loneliness. Every CEO, MD and executive that I know who is thriving does so because they are part of a mastermind group, a peer group, or have a touch point with me.

I’m not saying traditional business coaches aren’t useful, but they are very output orientated. They are focused on goals and next steps relating to the company and not the individual. I create a space for the person to be human, held and listened to. It is the biggest antidote to loneliness. Having this space for external support, particularly if you are in a new CEO role where you’ve entered a toxic work environment, for example, can be very beneficial.

It can also be hard leaning into colleagues when you are experiencing challenges. At the end of the day, you’re their boss and they know it. But you’re simply not serving yourself if you do not make time for you. You’re either facing loneliness or burnout.

You might be reading this and thinking ‘I’m not lonely, I’m fine, I go running/cycling/on holiday to wind down’. However, you’re still processing everything on your own. A common issue facing clients I work with is that by the time they go on holiday, they’re just too exhausted to spend time with their children.

The onward journey
One of the key habits missing from the day-to-day lives of CEOs I meet is scheduling time for reflection. I would highly recommend blocking out time in your diary to reflect on what you’ve done each week and I guarantee it is the most important investment you can make in yourself.

Moving forwards starts as soon as you have the courage to say ‘yes, this has been really tough and I feel pretty lonely’, you will soon see things start to change. How much things change depends on your individual journey, however creating openness and a dialogue with a coach, or at work, can help reintroduce the notion that we are all human beings. Perhaps another cliché, but as important as the one I started with, asking yourself the question ‘how am I really doing’ creates the space for humanity and reflection.

For more information on 1:1 CEO coaching visit: https://emmastroud.london

As the pandemic slowly retreats, it has left countless companies around the world short of the talent necessary to take fast-emerging opportunities that have arisen in its wake.

Simultaneously though, many senior executives are unwilling to leave permanent positions for new opportunities until the economic horizon brightens.

Just as crucially, the economic damage wrought by Covid-19 and, now, the war in Ukraine, means many companies urgently need prompt investment. And none more so than start-ups and SMEs, historically the most vulnerable to crises.

Clearly, the demand for executive talent has never been greater and, in its twentieth anniversary, global recruitment agency CEO Worldwide is rising to the challenge with its iCEO platform. First established in 2007 but now more important than ever, iCEO is dedicated to simultaneously plugging the talent and investment gaps in these fast-moving sectors.

It’s an agile platform that provides carefully vetted executives, often with many years of experience in the sector, who also contribute their own capital of up to $1m. The most common amount is $150,000-350,000 and is deployed by nearly 81 percent of arrivals while more than 12 percent bring $350,000-750,000, three percent between $750,000-$1m, and four percent more than $1m.

The number of openings over the next decade will grow by more than a quarter of a million every year

The result is talent plus capital — skin in the game. “It’s a vote of faith in the future of the company,” explains CEO Worldwide’s founder Patrick Mataix. “And it’s a statement of the executive’s commitment. It is an incredible leverage for companies to get a talented and committed executive on board with a limited impact on their profit and loss.”

Once again, CEO Worldwide looks to be ahead of the curve with iCEO. As the firm celebrates an innovative 20 years, it looks back on one ground-breaking initiative after another. Launched in France in January 2002, at first the firm focused on interim management services dedicated to start-ups and venture capitalists in the EU.

The vision was deliberately disruptive. Founder Mataix recalls: “As an entrepreneur regularly using the services of headhunters and consultants, I had been frustrated by the inadequacy of their answers and timing to solve the international problems I was facing daily.”

So right from the start, the firm concentrated on the values he believed were missing in other executive search functions. Action had to be fast, pricing transparent and behaviour flexible. And now, 20 years later, CEO Worldwide offers a full suite of recruitment services that has played a fundamental and important role in distributing executive talent around the world.

In that time the firm expanded in a series of milestones as it responded to urgencies in the market. In 2005, the firm began finding executives for permanent placement. In 2007, original iCEO started to make a growing difference for capital-short companies. Three years later came the name change from CEO Europe to CEO Worldwide, reflecting the firm’s increasingly global reach.

By then it had on its books over 10,000 vetted executives covering 40 countries. In 2013, headquarters was moved from France to the UK where its Top Executive search engine was launched.

It is an incredible leverage for companies to get a talented and committed executive on board with a limited impact on their profit and loss

And today CEO Worldwide can muster a full array of multi-lingual and multi-disciplined talent with a vetted pool of over 20,000 international executives covering nearly all countries and 84 languages. The firm’s clients comprise companies of all sizes from start-ups and SMEs to multinationals.

It’s a measure of the firm’s global footprint that it recently placed a CEO in India for its 1,351-first executive mandate. The firm also boasts 48 ambassadors covering 32 countries. And the vetted pool of iCEO investor-executives alone now tops 3,000, representing a cumulative potential investment exceeding $1bn.

Over the years the firm remained faithful to the original vision. It had to be nimble-footed and react quickly to the demands of the market – in short, client-led. On average it takes just ten days to submit a short list of candidates to the client thanks to a policy of pre-vetting. An in-house video platform allows the client to conduct interviews remotely, which proved to a valuable service during lockdowns and global travel restrictions.

And the pricing model remains a big attraction. CEO Worldwide’s fee structure is highly transparent – for instance, right from the start fees were not linked to total remuneration unlike most competing firms.

The firm was also ahead of the game with its female executive platform. Now four years old, it anticipated growing pressure from legislators and lobby groups for a more diverse representation in the C-suite. Indeed the platform was launched before European regulations that imposed gender and diversity quotas on boards and steering committees.

A runaway success, the platform boasts a vetted pool of over 3,100 international female executives covering 86 countries and 64 languages. Client firms were quick to jump onboard. An international corporate with over $8bn in turnover retained CEO Worldwide to provide it with top female talent. Other women have been hired in top-level management jobs and as non-executive directors in the US, UK, Switzerland, Germany, France and India among other countries.

As CEO Worldwide has found, the nations that are hungriest for executive talent are those with fast-growing digitised economies. They are headed by France with 763, followed by USA (399), UK (273, India (228) and Germany (185).

And the hungriest industries are those sitting at the leading edge of the digital revolution. CEO Worldwide has placed 959 executives in e-commerce and internet-based companies, 895 in consumer goods, 766 in software and 698 in IT and computer hardware. All of these industries have been turbo-boosted by the pandemic.

Looking ahead, demand for top executives in most corporates including start-ups and SMEs looks to be almost insatiable. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of openings over the next decade will grow by more than a quarter of a million every year as older executives retire. And that’s just in the US.

With its finger on the pulse of global recruitment, CEO World has plenty of insights into the current state of the market. “Many organisations are challenged when looking for executives,” says Mataix. “And that’s despite offering enticing perks and high salaries.” They urgently need people with experience – and especially in technology, the right balance of men and women, and those from minorities. Unfortunately, not enough candidates meet all three criteria.

“Many people who qualify for the first two criteria lack the necessary experience, which drives the current talent shortage,” summarises Mataix. “The current issue faced by the market is there are too few executives with experience looking for placements.”

And that, he says, is particularly true of women. Although CEO Worldwide’s platform is contributing to the availability of female talent, many women are declining offers in the current uncertain environment.

Age however is no barrier. CEO Worldwide is tapping a steady demand for executives over 55 years of age who often take interim or consulting positions where their knowledge and experience provides a perspective and depth that is often lacking, particularly in start-ups. Some of these placements turn out to be so successful that the executive is asked to stay on in permanently.

So clearly, it’s yet another disruptive move by CEO Worldwide.

Achieving gender equality is one of the biggest challenges facing companies today. For many, it continues to be an ambition rather than a reality. Yet at Landor & Fitch, under Jane Geraghty’s leadership, gender equality has been achieved across all levels of the business, with 46 percent of its women in leadership positions and 56 percent of all employees’ being female.

“There’s no silver bullet to getting gender equality right,” says Jane, reflecting on the challenges she faced in reaching this goal. “Throughout my career, it has always been a personal passion point and I’m proud to lead an agency that is equal across the board, at all levels.”

Alongside driving change at Landor & Fitch, Jane also has her sights set on helping and encouraging other companies to embrace gender equality, ensuring authenticity is front of mind: “My role as a brand consultant has given me a unique view of the inner workings of companies across different industries – and puts me in a position to help and support other businesses’ efforts to address inequalities. What we absolutely must put an end to is ‘femwashing,’ where brands want to be seen as ‘doing something,’ as opposed to actually making a real difference.”

From the beginning
While studying Politics at the University of Sussex, Jane became fascinated by political advertising and the role communication plays in influencing behaviour. That interest took her to London, where she began her career in advertising, before progressing into other roles on the other side of the Atlantic – working with the likes of Saatchi & Saatchi, McCann Erickson, Ogilvy New York and Kirshenbaum & Bond.

“At this point of time in the advertising industry, it was not uncommon to experience gender bias and discrimination. In the early days of my career, I remember walking down the halls of a creative department where the almost exclusively male inhabitants shouted their marks out of 10 for how you looked that day.”

Every brand should be thinking about how they can use their platform in support of a more equal society

Jane returned to the UK in 2007 with a desire to try something new. It was around this time that the world of media was undergoing huge change, something she wanted to get involved with first-hand. And that she did, working for ITV as Content Development Director and then Managing Director at Naked Communications, before eventually joining Landor in 2011 as Managing Director of the London studio.

“When I started at Landor, the branding industry was in real need of revitalisation”, Jane notes. “Brand consultancy as an industry had been slow to embrace technology and data within its offer, and my remit was to explore this while injecting agility and certainty into the work we were doing as a business. But one thing which caught my attention pretty much immediately was the wonderfully ambitious women who were already starting to shift directions and perceptions within the business, including the brilliant Emma Beckmann and Charlotte Morrison, who are still with us today.”

Working her way up the business, Jane became President of EMEA in 2013 and then Global CEO of Landor Associates in 2017. She has navigated many changes, including the merger with experience design agency Fitch, which saw the company officially become Landor & Fitch and Jane take the role of Global Group CEO. “I’ve had an incredible team with me on the journey,” she explains.

“We’ve brought motion into our offering with the acquisition of ManvsMachine, experience into the fold with the Fitch merger, and invested heavily in insights and analytics. Today, sustainability and inclusive design are placed at the heart of what we do, allowing us to grow and evolve in line with our mission of creating a positive difference through extraordinary brands, by design.”

Changing culture
Building on her personal success, Jane has shifted her role towards supporting the people around her. “I’m very much focused on my team – mentoring, guiding, and configuring talent to ensure success, both individually and collectively. Part of this is helping foster communities within Landor & Fitch that are dedicated to enhancing diversity and inclusivity.”

This commitment has seen Jane at the forefront of new initiatives that ensure everyone working within the company feels included and empowered. “We all know that creativity flourishes when different perspectives are brought together. As an industry, we had been too reliant on hiring and promoting the familiar,” Jane notes.

In 2020, in partnership with the London team, Jane championed the creation of a grassroots-led global inclusion group, Building to Belong. Their objective being to build and promote an inclusive culture and enable all employees to bring their true selves to the workplace.

There’s no silver bullet to getting gender equality right

As explained by Jane, “Equity focuses on measurable equality and is action orientated. It is a scalable concept that isn’t affected by cultural nuances. Whereas belonging is about creating cultural changes that are relevant to people’s daily experiences. Building to Belong means that diversity and inclusion is the responsibility of everyone at Landor & Fitch, not just a small few.”

“We approach diversity and inclusion through the lens of action and accountability, measuring success by impact and not intent,” says Jane. “We’re gender-equal throughout the business – more women are joining and succeeding than ever before. When women are in the talent pool, they need an environment where they can stay and succeed, and I’m thrilled that we are doing something right in that respect.”

Jane also participates in parent company WPP’s Stella network, which aims to address barriers that could prevent women from progressing their careers to senior levels within the group. “Everyone at Landor & Fitch wants to be a benchmark for diversity and inclusion for not only our WPP network, but the wider industry and beyond”, adds Jane.

Her presence and action in the fight for gender equality didn’t go unnoticed by the business industry either – last year Jane was officially recognised within The Yahoo Finance HERoes Women Role Model List; a showcase of leaders who are championing women in business and driving change for gender diversity in the workplace, where she ranked alongside leading women from Mastercard, Accenture and HSBC.

Branching out
Jane’s efforts aren’t just internal – Landor & Fitch is committed to driving inclusivity and diversity across its brand portfolio. The agency is currently working with some of the world’s leading brands on transforming their inclusivity and gender equality strategies, helping to reshape their purpose.

As Jane puts it: “Brands today have recognised the value of pursuing something beyond pure profits. Purpose drives brand consideration and differentiation, and sustainability and equality have been areas that brands have sought to address.”

One example is Landor & Fitch’s work with Microsoft on the ‘It’s Her” campaign, which ran during Women’s History Month in 2021, and aimed to help the tech giant elevate the role of women in tech. Landor & Fitch took over Microsoft’s internal platform, In Culture, and all of its social media channels to encourage more 18–34 year olds from disadvantaged backgrounds into the tech industry.

Jane’s team has also been creating new concepts and ideas for organisations dedicated to the cause too, including Women Political Leaders. Landor & Fitch developed a new brand strategy for the premier political women’s network, ‘Power Together’, and a new identity which builds on the focus of starting the conversation through a distinctive quotation mark. The team designed a revolutionary tool called ‘The Pulse,’ which uses data from WPL’s Twitter API and a sentiment algorithm to translate worldwide conversations surrounding women in leadership. Using cutting-edge technology and innovative design techniques, the living brand is informed by the data collected.

“The tool aimed to be a catalyst for action: to listen, learn and respond as well as serve as a visual reminder of our progress towards a more inclusive definition of power, which is another area we are very interested in, as designers of the future. What is the visual representation of power? How is it changing? How do we help inform that change?”

Jane presented this topic at the Reykjavík Global Forum –Women Leaders 2019, as well as joining the ‘Pictures of Power’ panel alongside Anne-Birgitte Albrectsen, CEO of Plan International, Hiltrud Werner, Member of the Board of Management, Integrity and Legal affairs, at Volkswagen AG, and Uzra Zeya, President and CEO, The Alliance for Peacebuilding (AfP).

But the push for change sits with every role: “Everyone has a part to play in gender equality”, she says. “If you are a brand owner focused on the male half of the population, you aren’t off the hook either. Every brand should be thinking about how they can use their platform in support of a more equal society.”

Challenges ahead
And this is only the start. The pandemic has seen women disproportionately impacted across all industries, as gender equality was put on the back burner in many cases. In fact, PwC’s 2021 Women in Work study found that companies will need to double their gender equality efforts just to recover by 2030. For Jane, this only shows the extent to which the pandemic knocked gender equality back.

But the pandemic has offered silver linings. Brands today recognise purpose as a means to achieving something greater than commercial success, and Landor & Fitch is helping brands to transform while continuing to drive business value. She notes: “Brand is now broader than ever in its impact and implications, informing experience, culture, innovation, recruitment, acquisitions, ESG, and workspace. It now has the attention and interest of the C-suite and is seen as a vital tool in delivering real change and business transformation.”

Landor & Fitch analysis shows that brand represents approximately 33 percent of business value and is a critical growth driver – brand and business strategy are connected, says Jane.

“Brand transformation is an adjustment of differentiation drivers to remain relevant to a variety of audiences, while also attracting new ones. It creates powerful platforms that inspire extraordinary brand expression and experience – platforms that unite people and spark cultural change – which absolutely includes the shift towards a more equitable and sustainable future.”

She also believes that one big challenge that lies ahead is getting the media up to speed with the pace of change: “I’d love to see the lazy, standard questions from ‘do you have imposter syndrome?’ to ‘what is it like to be a female CEO?’ stricken from every interview.”

In order to accelerate the pace of change, she thinks more flexibility is required in workplaces across the globe. “Flexibility has been a major stumbling block, but if there were a silver lining from our pandemic experiences, I’d hope that this has been overcome and that we will all embrace the necessary flexibility to bring more mothers (and fathers!) back into the world of work.”

However, in Jane’s eyes, the most important single step businesses can make is to eliminate the pay gap: “It’s not okay and the gap needs to be addressed emphatically and immediately. Stop the excuses, take the pain and take action.”

With clear obstacles on the path ahead, Jane and her global teams at Landor & Fitch won’t be letting themselves (or their clients) rest on their laurels. There’s an honest recognition that there is still a long way to go, with a need for action. But she is passionate about using the opportunity that design can offer and is determined to lead the way in making real change happen.

As memories of the Covid-induced recession slowly dissipate, the business world now finds itself facing a so-called ‘Great Resignation’. A recent worldwide McKinsey survey revealed 87 percent of businesses across sectors are facing or anticipating a talent shortage.

Factor in the pace of shifting technology and the polarisation of politics and society as compounded by the pandemic, and it seems we’re facing a perfect storm. However, if there’s anything recent years have taught us, it’s that the best businesses evolve. Overcoming this particular issue and winning the war for talent will be no different.

Meeting the challenges of adaptation at pace
Organisations face two interconnected challenges. The first is how to keep their people and culture moving at the pace of global change and manage a post-pandemic reality that remains highly stressful. In a world that still seems to be characterised by uncertainty and division, it’s no real surprise there is a gap between vacancies and available, suitably-skilled workers.

The second challenge is how businesses adapt their products and services, given the speed of culture change and consumer needs that also seem to shift every time you look away.

Speaking as part of the creative world, we love our buzzwords – and ‘T-shaped teams’ is very much in vogue right now when it comes to looking at how our own business is striving to meet both these challenges. It’s an idea that can work across industries, though, and is a good way for organisations in other sectors to future-proof themselves while also attracting and retaining high-quality talent.

The concept is simple – teams have broad consultative skills across the top, leading and shaping the knowledge and strategy they use with clients – the horizontal part of the T. In our specific case, this is supported by deep specialist and complementary skills in e-commerce, social media, analytics, and content to meet particular client needs.

This approach enables business agility, providing the right balance of leadership, management and specialisation to drive growth. It’s an easy model to digest and visually looks great in presentations and strategy sessions, though in reality it is much harder to deliver, manage and evolve.

To be successful, teams also need to be grounded in data and analytics. For example, at UM we’ve placed real-time analytics at the centre of every T-shaped team so all members can access the information they need at the right moment – from sales to media data to brand measures.

Look outside your traditional sector
We’ve found that locating fresh talent to make T-shaped teams work increasingly means looking beyond the confines of our own industry – as well as outside our immediate vicinity to other parts of the UK, Europe and around the globe.

Talented media people, we’ve found, don’t just come from media agencies. A myopic focus on sector-specific experience isn’t helping anyone fill the skills gap.

Instead, different interdisciplinary skill sets bring different and highly valuable perspectives – from anywhere from academia to architecture. Aligned to this, we’ve been looking to bring in more people from diverse backgrounds and provide them with opportunities to succeed. Again, they provide much-needed different perspectives.

These ‘hybrid’ teams with a matrix of specialists and outsourced resources create a heady cocktail of complexity. It’s a concept that’s counter-intuitive to the ‘one team’ principle and hierarchical structures that many organisations are more familiar with – even though they’re not necessarily happy with them either.

The key to success lies in ensuring people of disparate disciplinary and professional backgrounds are connected through data and share a common purpose.

An iterative approach
With the pace of change, getting this type of team structure right is an ongoing process. Finding, supporting and most importantly retaining the best staff isn’t necessarily cheap either, so it’s well worth investing in the resources to make it work.

Businesses should experiment and improve the critical pieces for success, ensuring the right processes and technologies are in place. Most typically that means budgeting for talent and training, as well as technologies to support collaborative ways of working across multiple locations.

The components may never stay still, so this approach needs structures for ongoing feedback loops to ensure things are working fluidly and that there aren’t certain parts of the process slowing things up.

Of course, what T-shaped teams are most reliant on is people being adaptive and open to different ways of working and thinking. What underpins and connects them will be common objectives and purpose.

Periods of change will be remembered either for great opportunity or characterised by stress and tension. It’s here that a business’s efforts in culture, training and recruitment become immediately apparent, because T-shaped teams enable companies to focus on the former and ease the latter – and that will help them attract and retain the diverse, skilled talent they need.

“From birth, I think we always want to better ourselves. This is in our blood, in our genes,” says Sam Cinkir, CEO of Este Medical Group, which provides medical cosmetics to clients across the world.

Since founding the group in 2015, Cinkir has made it his mission to make hair, face and skin treatments “previously only available to the top one percent” more affordable and open to “everyone”.

His strategy has paid off; Este Medical Group is now the UK’s leading skin and hair specialist, with a market value of £40m. The group serves more than 2,000 patients a day across clinics in Birmingham, London, Leeds, Nottingham, Manchester, Glasgow and Sutton Coldfield, with plans to open another 30 branches in the coming years – including a hospital for surgical needs to extend its reach further (currently UK branches handle non-surgical procedures, while plastic surgery, hair transplants and other surgical treatments take place in Turkey).

These plans are part of an ambitious goal to become the UK’s biggest cosmetics company in the next five years, adding to an international presence in Istanbul, Dhaka, Milan and Bucharest and driven by a strategy that puts people at its heart.

Humble beginnings
Cinkir says he knew from a young age he wanted to work in the health and beauty industry. He grew up in a small village in Turkey before moving to the UK at the age of 18, later joining an existing medical cosmetics company, where he spent 12 years learning the ins and outs of hair loss treatments. He climbed the ladder from trainee consultant to general manager, gaining leadership skills that would prove invaluable to his role at Este Medical Group later on.

It was here that he invented his own hair loss treatment and presented it to his director. The director turned it down – so Cinkir decided to go it alone, launching the UK’s first Este Medical Group clinic in Birmingham in 2015.

“I thought to myself, I can do this myself,” he says. “It was of course a gamble – nobody knew me at the time, but I took the risk and I started my clinic upstairs with one room. At the start it was just me and one other person working for me.”

Cinkir spent his life savings – £33,000 – to make his vision a reality, and the risk paid off. The company quickly grew, expanding north and south across the UK with a bold vision designed to offer innovative treatments for every budget without sacrificing on quality, testing procedures and safety.

Affordable treatments
The group now offers non-surgical treatments for hair, face and body as well as plastic surgery procedures, with solutions tailored to each client and budget.

“For the technology we’re using, it’s the most affordable clinic in Britain without a doubt,” says Cinkir. He says the company has capitalised on the fact technology has become much cheaper, quicker and safer over the past decade, with hair loss treatments now available “for as little as £2-3,000, compared to £25-30,000 10 years ago.”

“Surgery is also cheaper than it was 10 years ago, and non-surgical procedures are a lot more popular now because technology has been improving a lot, with big companies investing billions,” he says.

People-centric approach
But it’s not just the affordability factor that has helped the company to stand out. Cinkir puts the group’s success in part down to its customer-centric approach – which starts with investing in staff to help them deliver the best service possible.

Today the group has nearly 500 employees, each picked through a rigorous process designed to ensure every member of the team is positive and approachable, building trust among clients.

“I employ some of the nicest, most experienced staff, but I don’t only look at their experience,” says Cinkir. “I also look at their personality. I could take somebody who has no experience and train them to make them top therapists, as long as they have a good heart. What you can’t change is someone’s personality.”

Cinkir has made staff wellbeing and career development a priority, encouraging employees to contribute new, innovative ideas to ensure every member of the team feels motivated. He believes this has helped the company gain its reputation for excellent customer service and high-quality treatments – as recognised in its ISO accreditation and its average rating of five stars on Trustpilot reviews.

“I suffered from acne when I was young, and I remember walking into a clinic and a girl opened the door for me,” he says. “She made me so comfortable and I felt so small; I’ve never forgotten it. So when clients come to my clinic, regardless of their problem, of their colour or of their religion, we treat them with the highest respect.”

The future
That people-centric approach has seen Este Medical Group overcome multiple challenges – not least those posed by the pandemic, when the health and beauty industry was hit hard.

When the first lockdown arrived, the company was in the midst of opening three new clinics, including investing £5m into a new branch at Earls Court.

But rather than bury their heads in the sand, Cinkir and the team used the extra time to ensure every detail was right for when restrictions eventually eased and the clinics could open. The Leeds clinic was refurbished and other works were carried out to optimise existing services. The new Earls Court premises has since become one of the biggest in Europe.

These latest openings are just the start of Cinkir’s plans for the future, though. “I am not a person to have many goals,” he says. “My goal was to have one clinic originally and make it a success, but today I have many more, so I don’t want to be greedy and say I want to open Este all around the world. I believe that what is written for me is written for me.”

But with an ambition to become the UK’ biggest cosmetics company in the next five years, Cinkir doesn’t seem to be done yet. A mentorship scheme to support young entrepreneurs entering the cosmetics field is one of several projects on the horizon. These moves mark Este Medical Group out as a trailblazer in the business sphere at large as well as a spearhead in the health and beauty industry – and a promising example of the power one innovative vision can have.

Building a brand is hard work. Maintaining a brand is even harder. Imagine driving past a billboard with McDonald’s Purple Arches. Or, Max Verstappen telling broadcasters how much he loves Mountain Dew. It could happen with a poorly managed brand. That’s what Roger Dudler, founder and CEO of Frontify, helps prevent with a platform he and his team created for companies that helps manage their brands.

“Inconsistent logos, for one, impact customer trust and damage public reputation. But it’s not just about logos. It’s also about how companies speak, write and relay the story of their brand inside and outside their company walls. And, it has become much harder to maintain consistency for global companies if they don’t have a system that makes it easy to find, adapt and communicate their brand assets,” says Dudler.

What Dudler didn’t know in 2013 when he started, however, was how prescient his software would be. With an increasing number of people working from home fueled by a faster and more robust internet to power a world of online sites, mobile apps, social media and new devices, the challenge of managing a brand’s assets and all the information that governs them has grown exponentially.

“Only 10 years ago, Lufthansa was having to create brand assets and maintain them within an organisation spread across several countries with inflexible front ends that made it nearly impossible to be consistent,” says Dudler. “Imagine needing to share film footage for commercials. The amount of time our clients lost on exchanging assets in the past is remarkable.”

What Frontify has done is evolve to give companies such as Lufthansa a united front when it comes to things like logos, fonts and colours, as well as important and often changing guidelines about where and how the brand is used.

These guidelines and shared assets help prevent the damage to a brand that in the worst case could ruin their relationship with customers. A single source for all stages of brand building, Frontify also offers collaborative spaces for working on a variety of projects, templates for non-designers to easily be creative and a way to access it all through a desktop app.

Then came a global pandemic
COVID-19 accelerated the need for companies to function remotely in all areas of the business. “It was sink or swim for many and we could check all the digital-first boxes for them. We were already future proofing existing customers who’d built up their brand homes and we were able to provide a suddenly, business-critical solution for those needing to quickly adapt,” says Dudler.

I get fired up about Frontify building an ecosystem that puts the brand at the centre, where the platform is the connective tissue

With work scenarios in flux, being able to count on information and assets was critical to getting work done. Nearly half of Frontify’s enterprise customer portfolio consists of new contracts that were initiated during the pandemic, with overall platform user figures topping 2.5 million. One particular enterprise customer has seen total registered users skyrocket, up over 200 percent during the pandemic.

In the beginning
After studying software development and serving as an apprentice in his native Switzerland followed by several projects with companies there, Roger’s entrepreneurial development took a more serious turn when he started Frontify. Before Frontify says Dudler: “I was a coder doing obvious things like websites and I was in a very comfortable position getting good projects and coaching others.”

But Dudler didn’t feeI he was using his potential full so he started looking for something bigger and more challenging to channel his creative energy into. He began fiddling around with a new tool he eventually named, Clarify.

A pivotal moment came after he was asked to speak at a Frontend Conference and chose to talk about Clarify. In the room next door was someone more famous. In Dudler’s room there were “maybe 30 people.” But then the other guy had cancelled and suddenly his full capacity room moved to Dudler’s. At the end of the presentation a guy in the audience shouted: “Shut up and take my money!”

That was the starting point for Dudler to jump off and do his own thing. Eventually, he asked the CEO of the agency he was working for if he thought his idea had potential and he referred him to Doodle co-founder, Myke Naef who was also an angel investor. Myke and other seed investors including former Google software engineer and Frontify co-founder, Thomas Düebendorfer, and Cédric Waldburger of Tenderloin Ventures gave him the money to get started.

Myke who went on to mentor Dudler says of him at the time: “What convinced me immediately to invest and get involved was that Roger was a full-stack product builder. He covered all relevant bases. He had a clear vision and was able to build a product by himself. And, he did it at blazing speed with impeccable quality. It is rare to find all these competencies required combined in one person.”

The future of brand management
For Dudler, the gratification of helping people with their daily work continues to inspire him: “I get fired up about Frontify building an ecosystem that puts the brand at the centre, where the platform is the connective tissue.”

Further, Dudler feels processes should feel like second nature and provide the kind of experience that he believes satisfy the human need for reduced complexity at work. “I think personalisation and tailored experiences will be sought after and even expected by brands. Our new API enabling more customisation is a big step toward this realisation.”

Dudler also sees brand management breaking down the concept of where brand ownership lies and who brand builders are, empowering individuals at every level to play a part in the overall brand management process.

“This gives people the feeling they are really contributing from the ground floor and a part of something that matters,” says Dudler. “Ultimately, deeper analytics that reflect the way users are working with the brand will allow for better decision making and governance for ultimate engagement and expression.”

For most entrepreneurs, being at the helm of a business considered highly innovative, carrying out international software projects, and winning competitive bids against the ‘big four’ consulting firms, would be strong indicators of success.

However, for Adela Wiener, it was the point at which she realised that an established process automation solutions business wasn’t the right future path and the moment she decided to embark on a full-scale transformation.

‘Courage over comfort’ is the ethos that has driven Aurachain CEO, Adela Wiener, through her career and one that epitomises her bold decision to take her company in a new direction three years ago.

“The company was doing well as a services business,” Adela reflects. “We were implementing bespoke complex process automation solutions for enterprises across different countries. We had a good client base and were carrying out major contracts, winning competitive bids over larger players in the space, based on our ability to implement solutions in just half the time they could.”

Aurachain, in its previous iteration, was implementing client solutions using several different Business Process Management (BPM) systems but had already begun to develop its own IP in the form of accelerators to shortcut its implementation cycles for large banking clients around the world.

“Three years ago, I stopped believing that the intelligence of software developers should be used to build hard-coded solutions for our clients. The more custom work, the bigger the cost, the bigger the dependency on the vendor, and the bigger the frustration on both sides – vendor and client,” Adela explains. “We saw that the future was increasingly going to be about empowering organisations to build their own digital process apps and less about delivering these for them. This is why we made the strategic decision to move into the low-code application platform (LCAP) market.”

“Low-code is, first of all, a mindset. One that enables organisations to create digital apps without primarily investing in hard coding. It removes the friction between business and IT, bringing developers and business analysts together to collaborate and therefore allowing them to achieve quick time to value.”

Low code is a trend and opportunity that has also been acknowledged by Gartner, who heralded 2021 as the ‘year of low-code,’ and predict that, by 2025, 75 percent of new applications developed by enterprises will use low-code or no-code technologies.

Adela and her business partners began to explore the possibility of packaging up their existing IP and knowledge into a low-code process automation product to generate enterprise grade applications.

The Aurachain transformation journey, spanning the last three and a half years, has seen Adela drive the business through seed and Series A funding, creating a new product on a new tech stack, changing the organisational structure and part of the management team – while navigating the uncertainty of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Taking the plunge
“The transition from a solutions company to a SaaS product company was a complex one, requiring a whole new approach to structure, KPIs, acquiring and retaining clients, implementing and scaling.” explains Adela. “I knew building a good team around me would be key to success. I sought advice from people I hold in high regard from the tech industry and venture capital world, with experience in various facets of a SaaS business. It was important to me to get a range of different perspectives and expertise.”

Securing funding was the next step – and crucial to sustain product development. This is where Aurachain’s strong reputation in the enterprise process automation space was beneficial, enabling the team to quickly secure $25m of series A funding from private investors.

The biggest challenge
The key ingredients to a great product, Adela believes, is a foundational engine that works perfectly, scales, and is easy to expand with new features, either through innovation or client-driven inputs. The product development process was both timely and costly, involving the integration of all utility components into a single platform, that today is made of six modules.

However, Adela’s biggest challenge came with transitioning the company from a software services mindset to a product mindset. “Mindset changes are related to people and some people aren’t able to change their mindset very easily, if at all, especially when there’s emotion involved. I had to take difficult decisions to change the team around me and let some people go. As a CEO, I have a bigger responsibility to the company and the wider team to take the right course.”

Personnel changes were also in the customer success team to reflect the new vision – to be completely driven by delivering value to clients or creating a competitive advantage for the business. As a result, at Aurachain no decision is made solely on a product level unless is results in tangible business value for clients.

Since the initial product launch at the end of 2019, the team has won clients in Europe, South Africa and the US. 2021 has seen Aurachain increase its revenue tenfold on the previous year.

Covid challenges and opportunities
The launch of the product also coincided with the outbreak of Covid-19, which presented huge challenges to businesses of all shapes and sizes – but for start-ups especially. Aurachain had just launched its UK office in London and had begun recruiting a team there, but when the first lockdown was implemented, the team had to change its strategy.

“As a CEO you have to be ready for everything – you need to be clear-minded and not only react quickly, but also anticipate as much as you can. The pandemic made everything hard to predict, but despite this, it was one of our best years yet.”

Lockdown gave Aurachain the opportunity to validate its market position. Businesses needed to evolve quickly and were looking for faster, lower-cost and more agile ways of doing things. As teams, goals and processes had to change quickly, so too did their technology stack and critical business applications. Against a backdrop of global disruption and uncertainty, Aurachain increasingly gained client traction.

It was during this time that Aurachain began to work on a project close to Adela’s heart: a national system built in her native country, Romania, for a job retention scheme to provide financial support to employees through the pandemic. At the outbreak of the pandemic in March 2020, Romanian furlough scheme requests were being handled manually and taking up to 10 days to approve, placing immense pressure on government staff. As claims continued to increase, the government had to react quickly to find a better way to process the volumes of claims rapidly and securely.

Aurachain’s low-code platform was used to develop Romania’s National Job Retention Scheme Portal (aici.gov.ro). The app was built and ready to use in under two weeks and improved the work of around 1,000 public sector workers. At its peak, the app handled 48,685 applications per day and a significant number of applications per second. As a result, furlough application acknowledgement was cut to just 1.5 days on average, with many applications processed even quicker.

Despite her involvement in building a transformative system to help her home country deal with a global crisis, Adela still maintains that the two biggest achievements to date are the product and her team, with the resilience of the founding team being a key driver to getting them where they are today.

A foot in the past and a foot in the future
“I am a big believer that we wouldn’t have managed to be where we are today, as a company, product, and team, if we hadn’t experienced our previous journey as a custom solution business. We learned so much from each market, each client and all the mistakes we’ve made,” Adela reflects.

“As a product company, we know what we want to be: a leader in the low-code space, for enterprise grade apps, by offering a product that represents the best balance between the highest level of configurability for app creators and the highest degree of extensibility for enterprise clients.

“I can honestly say that the last three years were the most challenging years of entrepreneurial my life, and they were equally difficult for my partners and our extended team. But the reward made it all worth it.”

Rather dramatically, The Times recently reported that “in today’s market you have to be ready to fight and scratch someone’s eyes out.” This commentary on the current state of play in the London residential property market came from a respected buying agent who was observing how competitive the market is in certain price bands and localities.

In the capital, the market does seem to be bubbling under the pressure of a scarcity of supply – an issue that has long affected a city with limited space – and a surge in demand as international buyers return to the market due to easing Covid travel restrictions. No doubt, it is a competitive market. But that doesn’t mean you have to lose out. How, then, can those from overseas searching for best-in-class homes in the prime central London get ahead?

Build your team of wingmen
First of all, engaging a professional team before you commence your search is key. The best advice I give my clients is usually during the first 30-minute phone call where we might discuss tax, structuring, finance, timings and tactics. The same, I suspect, goes for early conversations with buying agents, mortgage brokers, bankers and surveyors.

Appointing a team before you even view a property means you are armed with the information you need. It also means you can present yourself to the selling agents as proceedable, professional and in control; something that will stand you in good stead when it comes to making an offer. This should include clearing compliance and Know Your Client (KYC) checks. These days, estate agents are legally obliged to carry out AML checks not only on their own clients (the seller) but also on the buyer with whom they are entering into a business relationship by virtue of facilitating the sale.

Digest the detail
Ensure that you have understood your tax and structuring position before embarking on making offers or negotiating price with a seller. All too often overseas buyers agree a deal without understanding the tax consequences (and therefore overall cost of a transaction).

Fine tune your finance
With mortgage rates still low, most overseas buyers who are not looking to bring all of their wealth into the UK will be well-advised to consider taking mortgage finance if they are concerned about their IHT position. If this is the case, then starting to line up that finance by dealing with London account opening and credit applications (which can take several weeks with some of the private banks) is essential if you are to be able to position an offer as competitive as a genuine cash buyer.

Keep people on side
Be nice to the selling agent if you are dealing directly or, better still, ensure that your buying agent is somebody well-liked and well-respected whom you can trust to negotiate on your behalf and ensure, if there are competing offers, yours is the successful one.

Look beyond your bank balance
The winning bid does not always come down to price alone. Proceedability is key. To that end, you may wish to make an offer that includes a very fast exchange of contracts or, perhaps, puts forward an exclusivity deposit, which you are prepared to lose in the event that you change your mind and decide not to proceed with the purchase. Sellers find this level of commitment incredibly attractive.

Buy blind if possible
If you are not based locally, consider whether you are comfortable buying unseen, relying on virtual viewings and your local professional advisers.

Organisation over anything
As you can see, ultimately, being organised is key in getting ahead of the game. Once a deal is agreed, this still rings true. Prioritising the purchase and ensuring that either your PA, family office or you are available to progress conversations means that the dreaded gazump due to procrastination or delay is avoided.

Ali Boumediene is the founder of Bomare Company, the Algerian electronics manufacturer. By 2025 he hopes to be producing 7.5 million televisions a year, and exporting 90 percent of them. He explains how he developed Bomare from a company that simply imported products from Europe for Algerian distribution, to an assembler and manufacturer that now exports high quality products back to Europe. His 7.5 million units goal will help create an atmosphere for Algerian engineers to build a successful life without having to go overseas, and help diversify Algeria’s economy so it isn’t so heavily dependent on oil and gas production.

European CEO: Why did you create Bomare Company, and how is it positioned in the electronics industry today?

Ali Boumediene: Well, I started my business in 1992; I just imported the product from Europe and distributed it to the Algerian market. And I had one time received an invitation from a big group in South Korea; I came back from my trip and decided definitely to manufacture my own product and export it to Europe.

I wanted to make a quality product, to international standard. This is a big challenge, because Algeria, don’t forget, it just makes oil and gas. It’s not a manufacturing country, it’s not an exporting country. So you have a lot of problems before, but, you know, this is a challenge. And until now I’m very happy to see my product in Europe.

European CEO: Bomare was identified by the London Stock Exchange Group as a Company to Inspire Africa; what does this mean to you? How important is it that you’re creating something for Algeria?

Ali Boumediene: To me it’s a big success. To give more chances to the people of Algeria.

For example, now: engineers coming from university, I want to train them, and give them a chance to open their own company. And I’ll buy the product from them to integrate their product in our product, and export. No need to fly to Canada or the US or Europe to work in this industry. So we have here the opportunity to work in Algeria.

If I can finish this project, with 7.5 million TVs, we will have to create a minimum of 1,000 companies: like medium, small, some start-up companies. So this for me, it’s a challenge in these 10 years, between 2020 and 2030.

European CEO: And what are you most proud of within Bomare Company? What drives you and your staff to succeed?

Ali Boumediene: You know, everybody now working in Bomare, when they see 20 years before, you imported some products from Europe, but now today they are manufacturing products and exporting to Europe, this for us is a big success for everybody.

When you have this challenge, you know, you are very satisfied to move from being completely importing and consuming people, and to manufacture and to export to the same market you imported from before? It’s a big success.

And now I have many managers pushing me more, to make this project. Because they know what the value is for Algeria, for Algerian people. And what you can do in future for Africa. Because you know, the next step for me is the complete African market. I need to create some companies in Africa to do the same as in Algeria, 20 years before. So for example, if I export to some country in Africa, starting to export finished products, definitely the next step is to start doing assembly there, and then the final step, you need to go for the innovation: completely LED.

“When you’re processing 20-25,000 tax returns and 146 audits a year, it’s extremely important to have a partner like Vertex that you can rely on,” says Sandra Blair, Head of Indirect Tax for Siemens in the US.

Sandra Blair: I’m head of indirect tax for Siemens in the US. We are a global conglomerate in the top 50 throughout the world. We have locations in every country in the world.

We were seeking a new tax calculation engine provider. In conjunction with the Vertex consultants, the DMA alliance partner, we were able to move seven SAP systems off of our previous provider, onto the new Vertex tax calculation engine. Move 3.5 million tax exemption certificates, and set up our use-tax accrual program in less than six months.

After a bit of stabilisation, we then moved our Oracle system in three weeks from our previous provider, onto the Vertex solution.

One of the big benefits that we have been able to obtain from Vertex is putting our destiny in our control. We are no longer having to reach out to IT to make changes once a configuration is identified, or an overpayment, or an over-accrual on the use tax, we’re immediately able to go into Vertex, test our solution, correct it, and get it rolled into production. So a five to six month process has now been taken down to a day, if needed. So it’s been a huge benefit, cost reduction, savings.

We have also had a report customised, so any of these changes that we have made because of Vertex, we were able to identify down to the penny how much we’ve been able to save. So it’s setting us up to take us into the future, into the digitalisation environment and economy. And Vertex, with their content, has given us a broader range to handle our conglomerate and all the service lines that we sell.

When you’re processing 20-25,000 tax returns a year, and 146 audits a year, it’s extremely important to have a partner through, like Vertex, that you can rely on. Their tax calculations, you know they’re right. That provides the right answer when it comes back in to your system.

Working with Vertex has enabled my shared service organisation to take on additional work without additional headcount. It has allowed us to increase our accuracy on our consumers use-tax filing, our accuracy on our customer billings, which has led to helping us increase our customer satisfaction scores from a tax department perspective: making sure that everything is compliant, and that we’re responding in the most efficient and effective manner.

Tax and IT departments today face an uphill battle, with constantly evolving tax rules and business changes. A Vertex tax engine provides a powerful solution to automate, streamline, and centralise indirect tax, so companies can reduce risk and increase scalability.

Vertex takes tax determination out of each individual transaction system, and puts it in a single global tax engine to support the sales and purchasing side of your business. No matter how many financial systems you use.

With Vertex, indirect tax is managed in one place – but leveraged across all of your business units around the world.
A Vertex tax engine delivers robust capabilities for the end-to-end tax process.

Continually updated tax content, maintained by the Vertex research team, supports sales, use, and value-added tax; plus industry-specific content for retail, leasing, food and beverage, and communications services.

Configurable tax rules let you configure your system to support your specific products and complex business needs.

Real-time address cleansing and precise jurisdiction assignment improve tax accuracy, regardless of where the transaction takes place.

Robust integrations seamlessly pass transaction details and tax calculations between Vertex and your financial systems in real-time.

Integrated tools to help you collect, track, and store exemption certificates. Reporting and data to automate compliance and support audit management. And options to let you deploy the tax engine in whatever way meets your business and IT requirements: in the cloud, on premise, or a hybrid approach that combines the benefits of both.

Find out how a Vertex tax engine can help you: reduce audit exposure, improve compliance, improve global scalability, centralise tax management, and increase productivity.

Integrate Vertex with your financial systems today, to make your end-to-end tax processes more efficient, agile, and scalable. Contact Vertex today to learn more or schedule a demonstration.

All tax departments collect data. But are you using it in an intelligent and insightful way?

Tax has access to one of the largest, most detailed datasets in the company: sales, purchases, expenses, payroll, and more. But many use that goldmine of information merely to support the monthly compliance process. You use data to generate and validate the monthly returns.

A truly value-driven tax function uses that data for more than just compliance. It leverages data intelligence tools to not only improve the accuracy of the returns, but unlock time, capacity, and insight, to become a more strategic tax function and drive better business outcomes.

You’ll reduce the time spent on compliance and focus more on higher value functions: like audit defence and planning to support the business.

Data Intelligence leverages every data point that already exists in various business systems, and turns it into insight for the tax function to enhance business outcomes.

Data Intelligence tools gives you insight about your customers, your vendors, your taxes collected and paid. Your newly released products and services. Your new selling and buying locations.

You can easily identify changes and trends; and pinpoint areas of risk that you can address more proactively, to impact the business sooner.

Data Intelligence turns raw data into insight; insight you can use immediately, to not only optimise tax performance, but to model, predict, and influence business decision-making to drive business growth.

It’s the key to moving your tax department out in front of the business, and becoming a profit centre; rather than just a cost centre that handles regulatory reporting.

With Data Intelligence, you’ll use tax data to identify new business opportunities, and influence business growth strategy beyond the tax department. You’ll become more proactive, not just reactive. You’ll measure the value contributed, not just the tasks executed.

A manual spreadsheet approach to VAT reporting is labour-intensive, error-prone, and costly. Keeping up with the latest regulatory changes is challenging at best; and the effort required to support business expansion can hinder a company’s agility to respond to market opportunity.

Vertex offers a cloud-based VAT-reporting solution to reduce risk, automate and improve process efficiency, improve data quality, and keep the business in line with the latest regulatory changes.

Import tax data from multiple ERPs, a tax determination engine, and all other financial systems – even Excel files.
Perform data quality checks and make necessary enhancements.

Map data easily to generate signature-ready, multi-language VAT/GST returns, reports, and AP/AR ledgers. E-file right in the application.

Access workflow tools, dashboards and reports, designed to let tax preparers and managers alike track progress across the end-to-end compliance process: from filing preparation, to approvals, to submissions.

And support audits with drill-down capability to detail transaction data and complete audit logs.

Vertex Cloud VAT Compliance enables multinational corporations to support business growth without additional VAT/GST process burden.

Built-in up-to-date tax content ensures you keep pace with the latest return forms and regulatory changes.
And efficient cloud access reduces the need for IT infrastructure and maintenance, accelerates deployment, and scales easily to support business growth.

Leverage a robust, multi-country VAT-reporting solution across the enterprise: ideal for decentralised tax departments and shared service centres.

Add Vertex Cloud VAT Compliance to your tax operations today, to: streamline process efficiency and reduce manual error, enhance data accuracy and transparency, improve audit performance, and accelerate scalability.

Since 2015, Fleur Hicks has led the onefourzero group overseeing its growth from a small consultancy to a thriving data-led commercial consulting firm. A strategic marketing and commercial operations professional with over eighteen years of experience managing blue-chip digital and broadcast brands, as well as turnaround situations in the B2C and B2B sectors, Fleur has delivered industry-leading digital and transformation strategies at board level in consultative and client-side roles.

European CEO gave this Manager’s Statement regarding picking Fleur Hicks as the overall winner:

“As the Manager and custodian of the European CEO Awards, I am truly delighted that Ms Fleur Hicks, for the first time, has been recognised by the readers of European CEO in winning this award.

Considering the scope and depth of these awards with the Chief Executive’s across 28 countries in Europe, the high calibre of participants and nominees, being named a winner is truly a wonderful achievement.

There is one quote that the judging panel and I feel perfectly encapsulates Ms Fleur Hicks and her success, ‘great companies in the way they work start with great leaders’.

People need to feel their self-worth, and when they do not we need to help them recognise it

The judging panel noted that Ms Hicks is not only the CEO, but the founder of onefourzero Group, a company that Ms Hicks has led since 2015. The panel were greatly impressed that Ms Hicks had the ability and foresight not only to identify a need in the market, but to back herself in believing that her firm could do it better.

Ms Hicks also impressed the judging panel in the fact that through her leadership, experience, determination and an ability to bring people together, Ms Hicks has led onefourzero Group to become an outright leader in their field in just six years.

Ms Fleur Hicks embodies all of the qualities, such as leadership, accountability, ability to inspire others, that help elevate and make these awards what they are.

Once again, I would like to congratulate Ms Fleur Hicks on her awards success in our 2021 CEO of the year awards”.

A leader with substance
Fleur is also a mentor with The Migrant Help Dream Academy, a member of the Supper Club and a member of Level 20, empowering women within STEM, Finance and Technology.

Fleur has worked hard to make the visions she had for onefourzero come to life, knowing an idea can be hard to achieve, but that change is possible if the work is put in. Fleur knows that a large part of growing a company is hiring the right people who have the talents to flourish and help make the company grow. Hiring people who possess the right combination of skills is also an essential aspect of her leadership, leading to success. Fleur recognises the importance of being comfortable with seeking out the help and experience of others in order to grow.

This is why at onefourzero the values that Fleur leads with are kindness, empathy, collaboration and integrity, believing deeply in leading more as a team than alone. She is a leader who listens to her team and their suggestions and wants every voice to be heard even among the recent growth.

Success is built from teamwork, a collegiate ethos, respect and integrity

Fleur’s leadership allows both her and the team to go above and beyond what other companies can offer and provide. The team at onefourzero offers clients a range of tech-enabled products to assist with M&A Advisory, Asset Monitoring and Value Creation. The platform also enables the use of multiple data sets from myriad sources in one central database. This one-stop platform consistently offers clients a means of using AI to transform data into a usable form for detailed analysis. The tech-led, big data, analytical approach that onefourzero takes allows clients to save time and money.

In regards to the inspirations which shaped her into the leader she is today, Fleur said: “I think my leadership style came from seeing how brilliantly things can be done through mentors such as Michel Cassius who led, nurtured and encouraged. That and holding my personal values true within my business life – plus a sprinkling of humour to get us through the day”.

The value of people
When asked what has led to her success, Fleur said: “it is essential to treat all people in any company as team members – whether you are the boss or not. I’ve never been scared to employ people a lot smarter than me, and I want to nurture their development for the betterment of the company and them”. It is crucial to be building up your team as you are building up your company to see the vision of growth you imagine come to life. “You can’t be scared to lose people through empowering them, they may leave, but you will have gotten the best from them while they worked with you,” says Fleur, noting that it is important to leave the door open for talent to come and go too. “Success is built from teamwork, a collegiate ethos, respect and integrity. This is a significant cultural value for me. I aim to act with absolute integrity at all times”.

Fleur recognises the importance of empowering people no matter what level they are working at within onefourzero “people need to feel their self-worth, and when they do not we need to help them recognise it. Everyone has the right to feel special and valued in whatever part they play in the company”.

The overriding philosophy of encouraging and equipping others is far reaching, Hicks believes in empowering people from diverse backgrounds as she comes from a multicultural, multinational, liberal family. “Neither gender, race nor nationality has ever been a consideration to me in regards to being better or worse for any task, role or job. It does not occur to me and continues to surprise me that people will consider this prejudice in any form, consciously or not. I am not so ignorant not to see that society still holds endemic prejudices against people, so I work to extend that sense of empowerment and respect beyond my company through mentoring and volunteering. Maybe if I can help one other person recognise their value and self-worth and go after their dreams then that will help their world”.

Fleur Hicks continues to lead onefourzero with a flexible and barrier-breaking style, celebrating the success of others and constantly trying to improve herself as a leader. This leadership style of never being static has been a defining attribute that has led to her success in the European CEO Awards 2021.

Eccelsa Aviation, a company wholly controlled by the airport management company Geasar SpA, is charged with making arriving in the Costa Smeralda a seamless experience for a range of demanding clientele. From Hollywood A-listers to HNWIs and heads of state, a who’s who of international travellers regularly transit through Olbia’s fixed-base operator (FBO). During the busy summer season, visitors arrive from all over the globe to stay in the region’s leading hotels and exclusive private villas. Others will spend their time aboard sleek super yachts, and with Olbia Costa Smeralda airport just a stone’s throw away from the Marina di Olbia, guests can find themselves relaxing on the stunning turquoise waters off the coast, minutes after landing.

The purpose-built FBO at Olbia Airport is an architectural masterpiece in its own right. Seen from on high it looks like an immense aircraft door, while from ground level its clean, sleek lines seem to swoop skyward like giant wings. As passengers relax in the cocoon-like comfort of the terminal, its elegant lines and the beautifully designed natural and artificial lighting create a sense of absolute privacy and tranquillity.

The terminal covers more than 4,000 square metres, and features a selection of luxury commercial activities to cater to passengers during their transit through the airport. A coffee shop and bar allow anyone transiting in the FBO to enjoy a local speciality, a glass of good wine, spumante or prosecco from the region while waiting to board their aircraft.

A glittering symphony of glass, steel and beautiful local yellow-hued granite, the terminal boasts one special design feature that makes it absolutely unique in Europe: a distinctive outer wing that allows guests to enter and exit the terminal directly from their aircraft Where this is not possible, passengers are accompanied for the short distances between the terminal and their aircraft on board a fleet of top-end Audi models, while a competent and well trained team handles their precious luggage with care and professionalism. The wing is big enough to provide shelter even to large executive B737s, A319s and A320s, the nearest thing there is to an airborne villa, offering hundreds of square metres of cabin space and including up to three bedrooms, four or five bathrooms, a lounge, office and enough fuel capacity to cross the Atlantic.

A professional team of around 50 is completely geared towards a culture of service, with a passion for problem-solving in order to meet even the most unusual requests that arrive on the Eccelsa Aviation operational desks on a daily basis. “In the industry of service, service is everything” is the motto here, and the culture of excellent service means making every effort to accommodate all requests. “We are all very much aware that tourism is a genuine asset to be taken care of and nourished, not only for Eccelsa and the Airport, but also for the entire region, as it provides a significant contribution to our economy, as well as our social and cultural heritage”, says Francesco Cossu, Eccelsa GM.

The terminal’s concierge service is on hand to organise everything visitors might desire to make their stay a perfect one: horse trekking, private aircraft or helicopters, Ferrari, Bentley or Aston Martin rentals, yacht charters – both bare-boat or with a skipper and crew. Eccelsa, throughout its sister company Cortesa, also provides first class in-flight catering, offering a menu of 100 top-quality dishes, ranging from simple sandwiches to fresh lobster, local Sardinian and Italian specialities, and fine wines.

July and August are the busiest months in the skies over the Costa Smeralda, with about 4,000 arrivals and departures monthly. Privacy and security, together with comfort, are among the qualities that private aircraft passengers most value from Eccelsa Aviation.

Eccelsa has an agreement with an on-site maintenance team to deliver first-rate ground assistance, integrated services for flight crews, and the option to house the aircraft in a hangar for the entire length of stay in Olbia. Air taxi companies and their crews are also well catered for, as these now account for up to 60 percent of traffic coming into Olbia Costa Smeralda.

Eccelsa Aviation may not be the reason why habitués of the Costa Smeralda choose to visit this renowned destination, but it certainly contributes to making sure that people have a truly special holiday in a truly special place, and encourages them to return to Sardinia again and again. On an island where hospitality, quality and first-class service are second nature, an incredible number of different cultures come together in total harmony for the entire summer season. And Eccelsa Aviation is there to cater perfectly to all their private aviation needs.