Hello, Rowan.

Untangled the pricing mess our biggest partners had gone quiet about

Three partners had stopped replying. Nobody wanted to say out loud that our pricing sheet contradicted itself depending on who sent it. I asked each of them what they were actually seeing, put it side by side in one document, and walked finance through it without blaming anyone. We rewrote it in two weeks. Two of the three came back.

Built the partner onboarding guide that people still use

Every new partner asked the same six questions and every one of us answered differently. I wrote the answers down, badly at first, then rewrote them after watching two partners try to follow them. It is not clever. It is just clear, and nobody has had to rewrite it since.

Hired someone nobody else would have interviewed

Her résumé was a mess of short contracts and a two-year gap. In the conversation she asked better questions than anyone else in the process. I argued for her, she got the job, and she's now the person partners ask for by name.

Being laid off, and what I did with the year after

The cut took a third of the company and it was not about me, I want to be plain about that rather than dress it up. For the first two months I mostly slept. Then my father got ill and I became the person who managed his appointments, his medications, and the arguments with the insurer. I got good at holding a complicated situation calmly for someone frightened. I also finally learned SQL, badly but well enough.

Taught a weekend workshop on writing in plain language

Twelve people, a borrowed community room, no fee. I'd never taught anything. Half of them emailed afterwards to say they'd rewritten something at work. It has never appeared on my résumé and it's some of the best work I've done.

Sat with a customer through a failure that was our fault

Our sync dropped three weeks of their records. I didn't have a fix and I didn't have permission to offer them anything. I drove out and sat with their ops lead for an afternoon while we reconstructed what we could by hand. They stayed with us another four years.

First time leading people, and getting it wrong for a while

I had four people and I thought leading meant having answers. It took two bad one-to-ones and a very direct piece of feedback from a teammate before I understood the job was mostly asking and then removing things from their path.

Rebuilt the handoff between sales and delivery

Deals were closing and then sitting for two weeks because nobody owned the middle. I mapped where things stalled, wrote a one-page handoff, and got both teams to agree to it by letting them each cross something out.

Moved sideways out of sales on purpose

I was hitting numbers and I was bored by them. Operations paid slightly less and everyone told me it was a step down. It was the decision that made everything after it possible.

Grew the repair café from one table to eleven volunteers

It began with me and a soldering iron in a church hall. People kept turning up, so I had to work out rotas, insurance, where the money for parts came from, and how to tell someone kindly that their kettle is beyond saving. Nobody reports to me. Everyone still shows up.

Talked the hall committee round after they tried to shut us down

They were worried about liability and mess. I asked what would make them comfortable instead of arguing, came back with a one-page safety sheet and a cleaning rota, and let them add two conditions of their own. We kept the room.

Built a rota spreadsheet that three other groups now use

Ours kept collapsing because people swapped shifts by text. I made something ugly that worked, then simplified it after watching two volunteers get confused by it. A scout group and two other repair cafés asked for a copy.

Learned enough SQL to answer my own questions

Started during the year off, kept going out of stubbornness. I'm not an analyst. I can get the number myself now instead of queuing behind someone else's backlog, and that changed how I argue for things at work.