Starting Angelica Solutions was never part of a grand plan. I had reached a point in my career where I wanted more autonomy and control over my work, so building a business felt like the natural next step.
What I had not appreciated was how profoundly it would change the way I thought about time, decisions and responsibility.
Accountability feels different when your name is above the door as there is nowhere for a poor decision or failing approach to hide and no distant department to absorb the consequences. You have to be prepared to change course, have an honest conversation and sometimes admit that something is not working, rather than allow it to continue simply because time or money has already been invested in it.
Cash flow brought that lesson home early because when an invoice is issued late, other financial commitments do not get deferred with it which means every vague meeting, delayed decision or unnecessary task has a visible cost. It takes time away from clients and reduces your ability to invest, so you become good at distinguishing work that genuinely moves the business forward from activity that merely looks busy.
That experience has changed how I view problems inside much larger organisations. Complexity is sometimes unavoidable, but it can also become a kind of comfort blanket: more meetings, more stakeholders and more layers of approval can create the appearance of rigour without necessarily producing a better decision.
A lean business cannot afford to confuse activity with progress, so we start by asking what problem we are solving and what needs to be different when the work is finished.
My own field is insurance analytics, where clients manage huge datasets, legacy systems and significant regulatory responsibilities, so the problems they bring us are often genuinely difficult. The challenge comes when that technical complexity becomes tangled up with organisational complexity, whether through unclear ownership, competing agendas or a project gathering momentum before anyone has agreed what objective it is meant to support.
I now tend to see each new client as a puzzle, although they operate in the same broad sector, every team has its own circumstances, pressures and way of working, so the interesting part is finding the combination of data, expertise and practical change that will work for that organisation rather than arriving with a standard solution. The people inside the business understand its customers, systems and constraints in a way an outsider cannot immediately replicate; our value lies in bringing an independent perspective, listening carefully and asking the tough questions.
My father taught me that turning down an opportunity does not need to mean a hard ‘no’; you can say yes with boundaries by suggesting a different approach or timeline. I have found that principle equally useful with clients, because being helpful does not mean accepting an expanding brief without question. Sometimes the most valuable advice is to narrow the scope, change the sequence of the work or be candid about what will not add value.
As Angelica has grown from a one-person consultancy into a small team, I have tried to apply the same thinking internally. My mantra is ‘Build wells, don’t bring water’: whether developing one of our consultants or supporting a client’s team, I want people to have the confidence to keep solving problems after the project ends.
One colleague joined us as a graduate and has since led some of our most technically complex analytics work, because they brought curiosity, initiative and the confidence to keep asking questions.
Many of our clients come from connections I made near the start of my career and those relationships have endured because trust is built through useful work, honest advice and doing the right thing. After seven years, I no longer see efficiency as simply doing things faster or more cheaply, it is about bringing clarity and accountability to a problem so that effort leads somewhere useful.
Large organisations may have more room for complexity, but they do not always benefit from it, and often the best contribution a specialist adviser can make is not another layer, but a clearer route through.
When my first business fell apart it was so hard – but so valuable