Started by a couple of birds intent on change.
This story starts once in 2000. Once in 2017. And once again in 2024. You see, in order to be waving the flag for change, you have to know when change is knocking at your own door.
We’ll start this story most recently – 2024. Founders Jo Hind and Alison Wilde had been celebrating 7 years of Birdsoup, reflecting on their original mission statement to be specialists in women’s careers.
There’s no doubt that they’d done it; they had coached women through maternity, counselled managers on menopause and delivered many women’s leadership programmes to build the female pipeline; but there was a sense that treating these issues in isolation – treating women in isolation – was not enough to kickstart long-lasting change on an organisational level.
Media started reporting on The Great Resignation, where people started quitting in droves. Opportunity seemed to be reserved for the chosen few and talent was leaking out of companies big and small.
2024
The pandemic was getting widely blamed for this mass exodus, in broad strokes. But Jo and Alison could see that the global effects of Covid on the workplace were little more than a marker in the sand.
What the pandemic did was force a bit of breathing space for people to examine their work culture. People can’t be blamed for lifting their heads up and having a good look around.
What they saw is what Birdsoup had been banging the drum about for five years. Bias loomed large, opportunity was for the chosen few and middle management was now floundering more than it ever had against a backdrop of hybrid working and shifting generational values.
It was time to broaden Birdsoup’s conversation; bias was still working acutely against women, but if they were intent on organisational change, from top to bottom, there needed to be more than a sticking plaster approach.
Jo and Alison understood that people transformation, company-wide, meant working with everyone. Inclusion needed everyone on board – not just working with siloed groups.
The founders took their own advice. They knew that change started with themselves. They were ready to present Birdsoup 2.0.
2017
Birdsoup came together in 2017, the culmination of a journey spanning over two decades. Two women and two paths converging over parallel careers and life experiences.
Having worked together in 2000, and then gone their separate ways, in the intervening years Jo and Alison had both gravitated towards careers where, essentially, they could help others.
They saw from their own milestones – the arrival of children, new roles in new organisations – that there seemed to be little room for growth and development. That was something they could never have imagined from the fast-paced potential of their early days together.
Their time wasn’t up; there was still fire in their bellies and they were confident they had more to give.
Together, they spent many hours trying to figure out what was going on. They became people-focused and determined to do something positive. With a raft of new skills in their arsenal, they knew instantly that the time was right for them to form a partnership again.
Birdsoup was born in 2017, and Jo and Alison spent the next five years working with women in organisations as broad as the NHS and TikTok, intent on achieving gender parity in the workplace.
2000
Y2K, the year the dot com bubble burst, and a meeting of minds between Birdsoup’s two founders, Jo Hind and Alison Wilde.
Jo and Alison met when they worked together as part of an all-female management team at AOL. Not only was this very unusual at the time, but for them, it proved to be a life-changing experience.
Between them, they have held senior leadership and C-Suite roles across the media industry, including at ITV, AOL, Dentsu, Omnicom, Channel 4 and Google; and they are also both working mothers. They understand the challenges people (and specifically women) can face at this level in business, and together with their qualifications and experience in coaching, facilitation, counselling, organisational psychology and NeuroLeadership, they are expertly positioned to lead this new focus on people transformation.