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.

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.

When I invited Rowley Douglas MBE onto Next Time Around, I knew the conversation would be worth having. He’s lived two very different careers — Olympic rowing and software sales leadership — and I wanted to explore what connects them. What followed wasn’t a neat retelling of his journey, but a set of reflections that apply as much to building businesses as they do to winning medals.

On Next Time Around, Lauren and I spoke with Susan Robson MBE, CEO of the Women’s Engineering Society (WES). Before taking on that role, she spent two decades at National Grid in risk, investment, and leadership positions, and was named by the Financial Times as one of its Top 100 Future Female Leaders. She was awarded an MBE for services to energy.

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 Next Time Around, Lauren and I spoke with Scarlett Allen-Horton — founder and CEO of Harper Fox Partners, a global executive search firm specialising in energy and sustainability. Many will know Scarlett from her appearance on The Apprentice, where she became Lord Sugar’s business partner. What matters more is what she’s chosen to do since: building a business that focuses on diverse leadership, the energy transition, and shaping a workforce that can take on the challenges of climate and sustainability.

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.