Helen ran the room before she coached it.

Helen Maxwell spent fourteen years inside a FTSE 250 infrastructure group, the last six as Managing Director of its UK division — 120 people, a nine-figure P&L, and a board seat with everything that arrives with one. She has run reorganisations she didn’t choose, defended budgets she didn’t set, and sat in the chair her clients now occupy.

She began retraining as a coach in 2013 — properly, over two years, while still in post — and founded Meridian in 2015. Since then: 140+ engagements with executives at listed groups, professional partnerships and scale-ups, almost all of them in the first eighteen months of a substantially bigger job.

The practice is deliberately small. Helen takes a maximum of twelve standing clients at a time, and turns down engagements where coaching is the wrong instrument — about a third of discovery calls end that way, with a referral or a reading list.