Trusted Executive Advisor

Ongoing, confidential counsel for leaders carrying significant responsibility. Susanne will be a sounding board that pushes back and doesn't flinch at the hard conversation.

Susanne Le Boutillier seated at a white table, arms folded, looking at the camera

The higher you go, the fewer people there are who can hear the real version of the problem. Your executive team has a stake in the answer. Your board has a view. Your peers are competing with you for the same budget. The thought you most need to test out loud is usually the one you cannot say to any of those.

Susanne sits outside that. She knows your context well enough that you are not briefing her from scratch every time, and she has no stake in which way you go. When something has gone wrong, you can go through it properly instead of managing how it looks.

She does not tell you what to do. She helps you think it through, tests the assumption you have not examined, outlines the options and says the thing your own people are being too careful to say.

I've truly enjoyed thinking on some problems in the program I run with an external leader who has been able to advise me about how to think differently.

Amy Holmes, Executive Director

This can run as regular one-to-one conversations, over months or years. Where the business needs a working session rather than a conversation, that can get built around it.

Career transition and positioning

A second strand, for senior leaders working out their next move.

The question at that point is not whether you have the experience. It is what you want from the next stage, and whether the pathway you have been assuming is still the right one.

It runs in four parts.

Take stock of your strengths, your values and your patterns.
Make sense of the career story, so you can see what you have to work with and what is pulling you forward.
Decide and position: test the possible pathways, work out what you want to be known for, and what signals you want to send.
Move, with your LinkedIn profile and your CV reviewed from the perspective of the panel reading them, and support before the conversations that count.

One to one, over about four months, front-loaded early and then spaced to match opportunities as they appear.

Susanne spent more than thirty years in the public sector, more than fifteen of them at senior executive level in health and human services, and related systems. She knows those roles from the inside, and she knows what happens when a capable leader has been in one system long enough that an outside panel struggles to read what they can do.

Client result

“To replace Susanne I'd need five or six people with different types of expertise, and I'd still have to explain everything to all of them. I wouldn't even contemplate it.”
Paul AthertonFounder and Managing Director, That Wall Street Guy

State of play: He'd run large teams in high-stakes organisations before, but always with levers he didn't fully notice he was using: the budget to spend a problem away, the titles and pay that motivated people for him. Building his own business, none of that existed, and he was still accountable for the result.
The way through: Susanne worked with what was in front of him and what he was building towards, at the same time. When something went wrong, they went through it properly and came out with a flexible plan rather than a feeling.
Result: More than four years of continuous advisory work with the chief executive, through the rapid growth of the business. He says he wouldn't have built an organisation this size, or had the confidence to do it without those conversations.

Start with a conversation.

See if you and Susanne are a good fit so you can find your way through.

Talk to Susanne

“I feel I now have the tools to optimistically explore all sorts of opportunities that are coming my way, without limiting myself. What a gift.”
Kate WilliamsUniversity Professor