Want to find out more about some of our experts? Click the links below to meet them.
Want to hear from them in person? Many of our experienced team members regularly speak at industry-leading conferences, workshops and other events. If you want to book us to speak at your event we’d be delighted to hear from you. Please get in touch here.
Before founding Accelerator alongside Henry in 2000, Heidi gained extensive experience in training and development in a variety of senior management roles. A regular conference speaker, Heidi is particularly skilled in developing potential and bringing out the very best in leaders.
Henry founded Accelerator with Heidi in 2000 after a successful career in senior management for companies like Sony, Lex and Hertz. Henry fully understands the critical factors in delivering service leadership in a business-to-business environment and has led many successful projects and programmes at Accelerator.
An excellent researcher and project manager, specializing in customer insights and employee engagement the past ten years.
Alena succeeded in helping businesses make positive change for their customers, employees and of course business growth. Seen as professional and organized by customers and colleagues, trusted to get the job done and go the extra mile. Feedback from clients and interviewees – ‘valuable insights, smooth processes, and excellent interviewing.
An insight professional with over 20 years’ experience, Ann Marie joined Accelerator in 2014, bringing her project management skills, extensive knowledge of research best practice and passion for customer satisfaction to the team.
Nina is a professional, highly capable training consultant with excellent communication skills, determined to help people make a positive impact in their work. She brings a ‘can do’ approach to her facilitation style and encourages participants to be proactive and enthusiastic in overcoming the challenges they meet.
Nina has a background in retail, travel and call centres, covering both private and public sectors. Her areas of expertise include designing and delivering customer service, communication, diversity and people management training programmes. She also has much experience in the field of employee engagement and change management.
Nina uses her diverse background to bring training to life, making it easy for her to relate to others, bringing fun, relevancy and interest. Through her commitment to training and development, she recently won a UK Customer Service Training Award.
Steve brings a wide breadth of experience from a background in Leisure & Hospitality, Financial Services and the Automotive Industry – for both B2B and Retail. Progressing quickly in the early part of his career into managing sales teams, then having direct responsibility for managing and leading training functions and training teams, he has real operational experience and can demonstrate empathy when working with both management and front line audiences.
Main areas of expertise include supporting culture change through challenging and developing senior leadership and front line managerial teams, designing and delivering programmes for communication skills, customer service and sales for all levels of employees.
Steve gets real motivation from stimulating people to think differently, behave differently and from adding real value to our clients business/organisational performance.
Before joining Accelerator in 2007 Richard worked in Organisation Development at Marks and Spencer following a store-based career in financial and operations management. Richard has an MBA and combines his business knowledge and functional management experience with a warm and engaging interpersonal style, making him a highly credible development consultant, facilitator, trainer and coach who can put work in a practical business context. He has been a qualified Emotional Intelligence Practitioner for more than 12 years and more recently a certified practitioner for a range of personality profiling tools from Lumina Learning.
Anwer Shah specialises in business strategy and research, with significant previous experience at Sony, Capgemini and Barclays Plc, where he was Strategy Director. Anwer leads consultancy and insights programmes for a number of our clients in financial, transport and energy sectors.
Lottie is passionate about all things training, coaching, sales management, quality and customer service. She draws on almost 20 years’ experience with large multi-national organisations such as Regus PLC where she held director roles responsible for quality and standards, business development, sales and operations.
Fluent in English, German and Swedish and a qualified NLP Master Practitioner and Coach, Lottie has delivered training courses on subjects such as customer focus and emotional intelligence right across Europe. An experienced executive coach, she thrives equally on a one-to-one basis and working with large teams.
A judge at the UK National Customer Service Awards and a member of the ICF (International Coach Federation) and ICS (Institute of Customer Service), Lottie has a proven track record in effecting personal, organisational and professional change for clients in sectors such as manufacturing, IT and Logistics.
Samantha joined Accelerator in 2018, with a background in psychology, public sector customer service, and recruitment. She now manages the Support Team at Accelerator, providing administration and logistical support for our training and development programmes.
Jacqueline is an HR Consultant with 20 years’ experience in the construction, private health, fitness, and technology sectors.
She has managed large scale employee change projects and business transfers, and implemented business improvement strategies, in partnership with key senior stakeholders.
She instigated senior leadership and customer service programmes to bring behavioural change in the workplace.
Bryony joined the Support Team at Accelerator in 2022. She supports with the production of our training materials, along with general support for the training team.
You do not get to spend over half of your life dedicated to public service unless you are passionate about people!
Enjoying helping to develop people so much, it was no surprise that, following a long and successful policing career he went on help develop the future senior leaders of the service as a lead trainer with the National College of Policing. From there Stuart entered the corporate world where he trained and coached senior executives of a global Fortune 500 company in leadership, crises preparation and management.
Karen joined Accelerator in 2002, initially in support/creative roles and then heading up our research team. She now leads our financial, legal and administration team and has been central to Accelerator’s growth and development over many years!
Torina has over five years’ experience conducting Customer Satisfaction and Employee Engagement programmes for global B2B organisations. She has worked with many sectors, and in particular packaging manufacturers, but has also managed a team of junior analysts and lead Best Practice initiatives. She has now joined the Accelerator research team as a Research Analyst.
Sarah is a Level 5 CIPD-certified Learning & Development Consultant and Change Management Practitioner, with an array of expertise working within the public and private sector.
She had a previous background in the police service, working both on the frontline and within the contact centre. As a result, she is an empathic trainer with the ability to bring training to life through experiential learning which is engaging and fun. Her areas of expertise include change management and customer service training programmes as well as safeguarding and mental health.
Annie has hands-on front-line and team management experience, coupled with a clear and energetic communication style which is an excellent combination for service and development training. Annie’s style is extremely participative and engaging, using activities and exercises linked to the workplace to promote understanding, learning and skill building.
Adrian has over 20 years’ of commercial experience in global organisations, including leading mergers and aligning integrated cross-functional teams. He now takes a people-first approach to supporting leaders and teams to reduce the strain and increase the gain of inevitable change. His training and coaching skills facilitate the process of switching to the ‘growth mindset’ needed to go on the journey of effective transformation.
Sam is our specialist e-learning partner with 18 years’ experience designing e-learning solutions, as both an in-house expert and a consultant. His approach is led by design thinking, user experience design and learning science approaches. Sam is also one of the most experienced Evolve Authoring developers in the UK.
Natalie joined Accelerator in 2013 as Accounts Co-ordinator and is now responsible for managing all client and supplier accounts, including invoicing and credit control. She has an NVQ Level 4 in accounting recognised by The Association of Accounting Technicians. Previously, after an initial first year of accounts experience in a manufacturing business, Natalie gained over 5 years’ experience working in financial roles at a London University.