The Participation Economy is a better way forward for the energy industry.

Am I busy, or am I making progress?

That was the question I put to my team recently, and it’s one I’ve been asking myself for years. It cuts to the heart of how I try to lead — not just what we do, but how we do it

At Powerverse, we’ve been working to build an optimal grasp of how we make decisions for a couple of years now. This is what I’ve learned.

At Powerverse, we’ve been working to build an optimal grasp of how we make decisions for a couple of years now. This is what I’ve learned.

At Powerverse, we’ve been working to build an optimal grasp of how we make decisions for a couple of years now. This is what I’ve learned.

On Next Time Around, Lauren and I spoke with Alex Baggallay, Growth Partnerships Lead for UK & Ireland at Salesforce. Before Salesforce, he spent a decade in management consulting on operating-model and front-office transformation. That background, combined with his work today on data and AI with enterprises, gives him a clear view of how industries are shifting.

On the podcast Next Time Around, Lauren and I spoke with Michelle Little. Michelle has worked in the UK energy industry for more than twenty years, beginning in customer support and later holding senior roles across several suppliers. She was part of the team that created the first non-standard tariff for prepayment customers, giving people more choice where previously they had none. Today, she continues to work on propositions that support decarbonisation and electrification.

People often talk about whether a start-up should be “sales-led” or “product-led.” It sounds like a clean distinction, as if you can pick one lane and stick to it. In practice, it doesn’t work that way.

We always knew Powerverse would go B2B. That was part of the plan from the very beginning. The consumer stage came first because it had to: before asking anyone else to trust us, we needed to trust ourselves. We had to prove that the platform worked, not just in a lab, not just on paper, but in real homes where life is messy and unpredictable.

In my last business, I led with an intense ambition to succeed. We set bold targets, expanded globally, and achieved milestones that proved what was possible. The culture was buzzing, the energy was high, and we built something I remain deeply proud of. That ambition mattered — and it still matters to me today.

My interest in sustainability goes back to university, when I studied geography in the early 1990s. It was the time of the Rio Earth Summit, and a growing awareness of the environmental crises we were walking into. I read widely and followed the science closely. One book that stayed with me was James Lovelock’s A Final Warning. Lovelock, who developed the Gaia theory of the earth as a single interconnected system, opened my eyes to the scale of the challenge and the need to act differently.