To create growth for others, and grow with them.

I have been a management consultant since 2012. It started at PwC in the Middle East, then Deloitte in the UK, on projects that transformed companies and sometimes whole economies. Along the way I met extraordinary people who coached me, mentored me, shared everything they knew, and connected with me well beyond work. We worked incredibly hard and had a ridiculous amount of fun. Some of them are my closest friends today.

I left the Big Four when I realised that the climb to the top is not really about how good you are or how hard you work. I did not want to keep feeding a model that builds equity for other people and asks you to give up your life and your mental health to do it. I knew there had to be another way. I also accepted something about myself: I am at my best imagining what could be, and I do badly inside a rigid frame that leaves little room to do things differently or to question the way they have always been done.

So at the end of 2022, I started my little business. I thought I would be a contractor, helping a few consulting firms on projects here and there. A few months in, I had far more work than I could ever deliver alone, so I began bringing in friends and former colleagues, people who had left the big consultancies to care for their families or to protect their mental health. We split the work equally, and the fees equally too.

I wanted to run an experiment. Would people behave differently if they could see that the whole thing was genuinely fair? The results were beautiful. Nobody competed. Everyone pushed for growth, everyone looked for ways to do more for our clients, and every one of us had our heart in the work. Clients felt it, and they loved it, and our client base kept growing.

Somewhere in the middle of all this I had a daughter, and I chose to be a present mother for a couple of years. Now that she is older and a little more independent, it feels like the right time to formalise the model and see how far it can scale.

I am building this alongside my partner and best friend, Isabelle. We complement each other well, we share the same values, and we have far too much fun working together for it to feel like a job. We know we cannot do this alone, and we are looking for people who share our values and our spirit to build it with us. We can only grow by serving growth, so if that resonates with you, come and join us on the journey.

“I wanted to know whether people behave differently when they can see that the whole thing is fair. They do.”

I grew up in a society that placed women in the household, and I was lucky enough to grow up in a family that pushed me to challenge that thinking. They taught me to dream big, to pursue those dreams, and to live up to my potential. I learned to question conventional wisdom very young, and it shaped who I became.

I started my career in finance, moved to marketing, and then discovered management consulting. I joined PwC in 2006 and spent fourteen years working very hard, under tremendous pressure, helping companies and governments make the right decisions. Then I realised I had never sat on the other side of the table. My advice was theoretical, and that did not feel right. So in 2019 I joined FedEx, took a global leadership role, and led the talent side of the FedEx and TNT integration. I learned how far a beautiful slide can fall short once someone has to implement it, and that to add real value you need to have sat on both sides.

Along the way, war tore my home country apart and I lost my haven. Pursuing my dreams stopped being a luxury and became survival. I questioned my identity and my purpose, and I came to see that I do not belong to a country or a culture. I belong to ideas and to values.

I also came to see that I was not living in line with those values in my corporate career, because I could not make the impact I wanted. Climbing the ladder asks you to fit a rigid structure and a rigid way of thinking. I do not like to fit for the sake of fitting. I reached a ceiling, and my excitement went with it.

That is when my path crossed Lara’s, my business partner and best friend. The timing was right. I took a leap of faith, and we built a company that reflects our shared values and the impact we want to leave, by doing the right thing for our clients and for our partners. We challenge each other, we complement each other, and we laugh far more than two people working this hard probably should. We believe in abundance rather than scarcity, and we work from a place of fairness rather than greed. Perhaps it is an act of rebellion, but we believe clients deserve senior experts who have stood where they stand, and that those experts should own their work and carry real skin in the game.

“The best advice comes from people with skin in the game. At Ilanora, that isn’t a philosophy. It’s the structure.”