01
Before
Allison grew up on the Wirral, studied science at Leeds and expected to end up in a lab. Her lecturer pointed her towards pharmaceutical sales instead. She joined MSD as a rep, then spent 17 years at Napp, starting as a specialist key account manager and working up through the commercial side to general manager for the UK and Ireland.
She loved the job: the complexity, and every day being different. The difficulty was that Napp was part of a global organisation. She sat on the UK board, but strategy was set globally, and "the global decisions weren't always right for the UK business." With a culture she didn't want to be part of, she left.
She planned to go straight into another general manager role. Then, a couple of months into her time off, her nine-year-old son said to her: "You're so happy now. I want you to be as happy as you are now but with a job." "It just made me think, what am I doing?" she says. "Why am I going to walk straight back into another job where it takes me away from my family?"
Coaching made sense to her. "Every little bit of experience, expertise I've developed in my career had put me to a point where I could offer value to more business owners." She knew the need from the other side, too. "It can be quite a lonely position, a general manager role, or as a business owner. If I'd have had a business coach, I'm not saying the outcome would have been different, but I would have felt so much more comfortable and confident."
“Honestly, I don't think I would have ever been able to do this without BCA.”
02
The build
She did her due diligence. She read what people said about BCA, spoke to Pam, and asked to speak to a member with a background like hers. "People buy from people," she says. "I trusted Pam." She joined in the middle of January.
She went "full steam ahead", taking the modules in order: the coaching certification first, done within her first few weeks, then marketing. There she overdid it, spending two weeks checking every name on her prospect list because she didn't want a message reaching the wrong person. Pam asked her what on earth she was doing. "I probably cared a bit too much about that at first."
Her campaign ran and brought in interested people. She had always been confident about the meetings themselves. "The thing that I worried about was the getting to that point, the acquisition, and getting in front of somebody." In April she also took on two to three days a week of consultancy for six months. "We know cash is king," she says. It gives her a backup while she builds the practice.
Her first two value sessions fell on the same day. The first was a one-man business that had only started in January, nowhere near her ideal client, so she treated it as practice for the one she really wanted later that day. Both signed. Her lesson: "Don't be a victim to the script." Know what you need to uncover, the problem, the urgency, what they've already tried, then trust yourself to ask the questions your own way.
She rewrote the About section on her LinkedIn in her own voice, too. The support team's draft was good, she says, "but they don't know my industry like I know my industry." In life sciences you have to be careful talking about profit, "because there's a patient at the end of it." Once she changed it, "I had so many more comments and people reaching out."
03
Now
Her network took her somewhere she hadn't expected. A contact at a venture capital firm showed her that early-stage life sciences businesses, often scientists with a spin-out and a great idea, are backed by VC and private equity firms that will pay for a business coach or board chair to protect their investment. They want someone who has launched products into UK healthcare and can help a founder run a business for the first time. "Apparently that altogether is quite rare."
She now targets those founders through VC and PE firms and universities, alongside established life sciences businesses, which fit BCA's ideal client. "I had absolutely no idea" that's where it would lead, she says. In five years she sees a portfolio career with coaching at the centre of it, and perhaps a chair role.
"Honestly, I don't think I would have ever been able to do this without BCA," she says. She came from marketing, but the automation and the tried-and-tested advice "would have taken me years" to work out alone. "I would be in another firm as a GM, experiencing similar things to what I experienced before, rather than taking control of my own career."
At home, the change is the one her son asked for. "My husband honestly said he's got his wife back," she says. "I feel like I have the energy in my step back."
