The Leadership Shift: Building the exec team you need - and making it work

Bianca is a leadership coach, former tech leader, & founder of Sprout Coaching. With over 20 years in the tech industry, she works with founders, managers, & growing teams to build the leadership capability that underpins scalable, investable businesses. She specialises in helping early-stage & scaling companies strengthen what sits behind the tech: team effectiveness, role clarity, decision-making, & leadership confidence. At the heart of her work is the knowledge that high performance comes from inclusive, human-centred leadership where people feel valued, supported & able to do their best work. This creates the alignment, ownership, and momentum that stand up to the scrutiny of investors, senior hires & rapid growth. Her approach is shaped by her experience, from navigating unclear expectations to leading teams without the tools she needed. After training as a Transformational Coach, she applied coaching within her teams & saw measurable shifts in accountability, development, retention, and engagement. Today, she supports founders & managers to lead with clarity, embed coaching & feedback into everyday practice & build high-performing, happy teams that scale.

Claire Johnson is Head of Leadership Development at Shrine London and the creator of Think Like an F1 Driver, a leadership and decision-making framework designed for founders and leaders operating under sustained pressure. With over 20 years' experience across elite sport, performance coaching, and leadership development, Claire specialises in how leaders think, decide, and perform when conditions are volatile and the margin for error is small. Her work focuses on physiological control and decision clarity under pressure, leadership behaviour under stress, and building performance stability in complex, fast-moving environments. Claire has worked with founders, executives, and leadership teams across multiple sectors, supporting organisations navigating growth, operational strain, and moments of transition. She is recognised for translating elite performance principles into practical leadership behaviours that stand up in real business conditions, where time is limited, information is imperfect, and accountability matters. As the creator of Think Like an F1 Driver, Claire draws on the realities of motorsport, where decisions are made at speed and consequences are immediate, to help leaders understand how they operate under pressure and how to build systems that support better decisions, stronger standards, and sustained performance. At Shrine London, Claire works alongside founders and leadership teams to develop the human performance layer that underpins execution, value creation, and long-term resilience.

Founder and CEO of Genio. An entrepreneur and innovator in learning technology with over 15 years of experience in higher education. Focused on exploring how technology can be used to tackle learning challenges and expand possibilities for every learner. Leading on the long-term vision and the development of award-winning products that help students globally overcome learning challenges and support independent learning.

Lou Matthews is the founder and director of Culture Craft, a people and culture agency built for scaling UK startups. After years watching HR support fail to reflect the reality of how startups operate, Lou built something different: an embedded, transparent alternative that puts founders first. Culture Craft has seen huge demand in its first year, and has been shortlisted for a number of awards including the UK Startup Awards and ClimbUK, validating the appetite for a more commercial, fast-moving approach to HR. Lou is a Certified Scrum Product Owner, which shapes how Culture Craft delivers work: building culture as a product, in focused sprints, with clear scope and visible progress, so scaling teams always know what they're getting and when. Culture Craft's view is simple: when culture works, everyone wins.