joint managing directors - Louise Whitehead & Andy Pellant

Louise's career in essence has followed two main tracks. Between 1979 and 1991 Louise embarked on a number of sales, operational then HR and employee relations roles, culminating in her appointment as the HR director of Beefeater Steakhouses. Working through the acquisition of Beefeaters major competitor Berni Inns, Louise developed a range of valuable skills ensuring the promised acquisition synergies were realised, despite the long-standing and ingrained cultural values within the two organisations. The painful and, at times, gruelling but satisfying alignment of the two competing organisations and the birth of her first child led Louise to the second half of her career as a consultant.

During the early 90s Louise was engaged to support a variety of mergers and acquisition projects with the aim of bringing disparate groups of employees to work together. She facilitated various large-scale change and transformation programmes for a range of businesses and became part of the founding team of an e-learning company called Learn2Earn, where her role was to define and manage the customer interface and relationship to establish a new personal learning system.

Louise started working with her business partner, Andy Pellant, in 1996 and in 2004 they founded emergentedge, operating at the leading edge of thinking, research, coaching and development around entrepreneurship, leadership, personal effectiveness, enterprise skills and management.

Louise is a genuine and very tenacious consultant who loves to enable others to grow and develop their own, as well as their organisation's, capabilities and performance. She has a comprehensive business background, having worked for Whitbread, Sears, Rank Hovis McDougal and the Burton group (now known as Acadia), as well as having run her own business. Louise's core skills are in the areas of leadership and performance, coaching and effective strategic implementation throughout an employee base. She is able to create flexible solutions from a deep understanding and application of many disciplines. She blends detailed insight with determined, pragmatic yet powerful skills in working with people.

Andy brings a history of personal and organisational success to his work as a consultant, coach, change specialist, author and speaker. After many successful years in global corporate positions he founded a start-up business that created a new breed of IT company in the late 1980s. This business successfully recognised the need to connect organisational agility to changes in customer demand and succeeded in growing fast despite the economic climate of the late 80s and early 90s.

The organisation was acquired within three years and the merged business reversed into a UK Public Company to create a new fully quoted Public Company, Enterprise Computer Holdings. As CEO of one division and a main board director of the holding company, Andy gained invaluable experience in strategy, business alignment and board-room politics.

Since completing his earn-out in the early 1990s and having formed emergentedge with Louise in 2002, Andy has been highly successful in the areas of organisational performance, talent management, leadership and entrepreneurship. He is recognised as a franchise specialist and has worked extensively in supporting boards and board level talent in developing a more entrepreneurial approach to organisational and personal leadership.

Andy speaks regularly and has been published in many magazines internationally. He had his first book published in 2007 (The Essential Guide to Talent Management) and this has been translated in to several languages.

Andy continues to feel passionately about the application and execution of common sense and offers a highly practical and achievable approach to significant personal, team and organisational change. In addition to his experience, Andy also operates with an effective blend of humility, fierce resolve and extreme integrity. His personal style, blended with a great sense of humour and rapport, supports the possibility of significant capability transfer and transformation.

Andy is married, lives in Hertfordshire and has three grown-up children.