Your career has taken you from forensic accounting at Deloitte to global leadership in Swiss private banking, and now to building your own business. Was that always the plan?

There was certainly ambition, although I couldn’t have predicted the route. Growing up in a small market town in the middle of the UK, I used to always choose a trip to London as my birthday treat. I loved the city’s energy and sense of possibility. By the late 1990s, I was living and working there as a Chartered Accountant at Deloitte.

My career developed through global investigations into white-collar crime, remediation and transformation programmes. These were complex environments where understanding the facts was only part of the challenge. You also had to exercise judgement, establish trust and bring together people with very different expertise.

Looking back, those experiences gave me the foundations for my business. At the time, I focused on the next challenge rather than how the different parts might eventually connect.

Were there experiences that changed what you wanted to achieve through your work?

In my early forties, I became increasingly conscious of the diminishing number of women around me. Often, I was the only senior woman in the room.

I led Deloitte Switzerland’s Women in Leadership initiative and remember presenting to around 90 men, including the CEO, about increasing female representation in leadership.

That experience broadened my perspective. I became increasingly interested in the circumstances that allow people to progress, whose contribution gets recognised and the assumptions that influence those decisions.

It strengthened my interest in helping people recognise their capabilities and take a more informed, active role in shaping their careers.

How did experiencing redundancy influence your next chapter?

Being made redundant in 2022 from a Swiss Private Bank brought those questions much closer to home.

After a long corporate career, I had to consider how I wanted to use my experience beyond the organisational structure in which I had built it. It required me to distinguish between the position I had held and the contribution I could still make.

It also deepened my appreciation of the personal impact of career uncertainty. Professional experience does not make you immune to questioning yourself when your circumstances change.

That perspective informs my coaching. I bring commercial judgement and an understanding of hiring, alongside respect for how exposed someone can feel when considering their next move.

What brought those experiences together in The Obvious Hire™?

I could see a recurring problem: accomplished professionals struggling to explain their relevance to the opportunities they wanted.

Having hired and led people for many years, I understood the assessment taking place on the employer’s side. Having experienced career transition myself, I also understood how difficult it can be to examine your own experience objectively.

The Obvious Hire brings those perspectives together. It helps professionals work backward from the hiring decision: understand what the employer needs, identify the value they can bring, and provide credible evidence of their ability to deliver.

It has four parts: Understand Your True Professional Value; Position Yourself Clearly in the Market; Get Access to the Right People & Opportunity; and Convert Opportunities into Offers.

Together, they provide a structured approach to the whole search. The tools and coaching help professionals make informed choices about where to focus, communicate their relevance, and build an employer’s confidence at each stage.

What do you most want experienced professionals to understand about their own careers?

That some of their most valuable experience may be hidden in the work they take for granted.

When someone says, “That was simply my job,” I want to understand what the job actually required. What decisions did they make? What competing interests did they reconcile? What became possible because of their involvement?

My investigative background is useful here. I’m accustomed to looking beneath a headline, examining the evidence and understanding the circumstances.

That often reveals a much stronger professional contribution than the person has recognised. The next step is to establish where that contribution will be most relevant. Both parts matter: understanding your value and understanding who needs it.

As a board member and entrepreneur member of PWN Zug & Zurich, what do you value most about being part of the community?

As an entrepreneur member, I value the exchange of experience and perspectives. Building a business brings different challenges from those I encountered in corporate life, and being part of a community where we can learn from one another is valuable.

As a board member, I particularly enjoy being in a position to help shape PWN Zug & Zurich’s future. Through my responsibility for Programme & Mentoring, I can contribute to decisions about how we support members, bring people together, and draw on the expertise within our network.

Having benefited from different perspectives throughout my own career, it is rewarding to help create those opportunities for others.

And what would we discover about Emily over a coffee?

Perhaps that my entrepreneurial ambitions began with a mud Scotch egg business behind the garden shed! I shaped mud into eggs and rolled them in orange sand to resemble breadcrumbs. I also ran “Office Services Ltd”, using stationery packs from my mother’s clothes catalogue!

Creativity has always been part of my life, and I love art, both digital and analogue.

I also love hiking in the beautiful Swiss mountains. But I’m very much a home bird too: a cosy evening at home with my partner is one of my favourite ways to spend time. He is a fabulous chef, so there is usually very good food involved!