Vanessa has a passion for operational excellence with extensive experience which enables her to bring a rounded approach, she is known for her pragmatic and effective solutions that support organisations of all sizes, in the last 25 years she has worked across many areas of the recruitment industry; Executive Search, Interim Management, Contingent & Volume Recruitment, Recruitment Communications, Employer Branding, Creative & Digital Marketing, Media, and Assessment Services, where she has led teams, developed services and implemented solutions both internally for Recruitment businesses and for Private and Public Sector clients.

Vanessa loves to get her sleeves rolled up so ‘The solution’ has always been her driving focus and bringing it to life through the organisation’s people, engaging, supporting, and coaching them to become their best. Previously as a COO for an Interim & Executive Search Firm (76 Employees, 86m Turnover) in 2018, where the business had a strong external brand but needed to bring efficiencies, streamlining, automation and be able to continue to scale at speed, she achieved 100k saving in year 1 and implementing a new operating model that achieved those.

As COO Vanessa’s remit included People & Culture, HR, Marketing, IT, Governance, Compliance and Legal, and working with the board to future proof and remove risk. But developing the talent across the business still remains her favourite part of the job.

Prior to that Vanessa has an interesting background from being a Creative Director of an award-winning agency, Operations Director where she jointly ran a Recruitment Advertising Agency specialising in Not-for-Profit clients, like Macmillan, Barnardo’s, British Museum and Care UK. Head of Sales for a large Full-Service Recruitment Agency and later running all the service areas as a Director (200 employees) reporting into Global Head office in Zurich.

This experience supports how she builds an effective operating model and how these solutions are embraced, adopted, and lived by the organisation’s talent.

If you ask people that have worked with Vanessa to sum her up, they would say honest, empathic, inclusive, straight-talking, and someone that genuinely cares.

Specialism
Technology, Systems & Operational Excellence - Review, design and implement operating models that fit businesses size and growth plans, bringing efficiencies, improving quality, and reducing costs that are embedded and adopted by your teams, to live and own.
Growth Management & Business Planning - Design & Develop your Roadmap for a robust platform to build and expand your business that supports your vision, values, and business strategy. This provides you with the ‘How’
Mentoring & Leadership Support - Providing COO Advisory support, coaching, training or mentoring to Leaders, and growing Operations, Finance or Marketing talent, allowing them to grow with the business and become future Leaders
Governance and Compliance - Review & implement all compliance; Risk Register, Business Continuity Plan, Data Protection, and guidance on policy adoption. Build a great customer and employee experience that is supported by your compliance – rather than the other way round.
Reference 1
“As a corporate chair, Vanessa is exactly the sort of get-on-with-it, gets-stuff-done executive that gets your business into shape. I would work with her anytime and anywhere, because besides actually doing her job superlatively well, she makes it a pleasure to come to work”. Sir Trevor Phillips OBE

Reference 2
I had the pleasure of working with Vanessa during her three years as COO at Green Park. During that time I got to know her well and worked closely with her on a number of initiatives and issues.

Let me start by saying that I am a massive fan of Vanessa’s and would highly recommend her to anyone seeking operational assistance whether it be across the support functions or specifically in individual areas (marketing, ops, systems etc`) - her skill base, knowledge and experience covers it all. Vanessa operates at board level but is equally happy to 'roll her sleeves up” where appropriate; there are no airs and graces to her!

Most importantly to me, Vanessa has a huge duty of care, is extremely professional, totally trustworthy, an excellent problem solver and a pleasure to work with. John Rose, NED

Reference 3
Vanessa has helped us to embed our Head of Finance and Operations into the team. She has done this by helping us with the pitfalls of moving CRM. She has helped us create frameworks for communication and change management which help deliver our objectives to everyone in the business. We like to see Vanessa as an extension to our team and she is always on hand to help. I would recommend Vanessa to anyone looking to improve the operations function within their business. Grant Taylor, Founder & MD of Flourish Education

Reference 4
“Vanessa has been hugely helpful with regards to helping me prepare my business ahead of getting ready to scale. From advising us to make sure all appropriate operational processes and foundations are in place through to helping us ensure we have the right HR onboarding portal and data & analytics dashboards, she has been incredible. Given her many years of operations expertise in the recruitment space, I cannot recommend her highly enough, regardless of business size or what stage of the journey any firm might be in” Alex Lazaridis, Founder of Laz Partners

Reference 5
“Vanessa’s engagement with Cloud International afforded us a wide overview of our operational structure and business processes and additionally professional advice on if, and where, we could improve our current approach. She spent time with our internal teams understanding our set-up and subsequently providing an exceptional and detailed report for us, offering recommendations and insights into how we could optimise our business. We would not hesitate in recommending her should you need deep and experienced advice on operational recruitment processes and systems.” Tim Harlow, Group CEO of Cloud International