Alison Edgar
Change programmes tend to unravel in the weeks after they are announced. Standards quietly slip and accountability diffuses once the strategy slides have been filed. Most organisations are announcing the next transformation before the last one has fully landed.
Dr Alison Edgar MBE helps organisations build the accountability and everyday standards that separate announced change from delivered change.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Dr Alison Edgar MBE
- The intrapreneurship methodology addresses a specific organisational failure: talent hired to think and then trained to execute. It gives teams ownership inside the existing structure without asking for a reorg.
- Operator before author. She built her career inside Yell during the Yellow Pages collapse, founded her own training business in 2011, and advises UK government on small business policy. The frameworks on stage were built for a business she was running at the time.
- The work sits in the mechanics of accountability. The Intrapreneur Mindset and her Big Balls® prioritisation framework give managers a shared language for ownership and follow-through that outlasts the keynote.
- Designed to land in mixed rooms. Leaders, managers, and front-line teams leave a session with the same vocabulary and the same expectations, which matters when a change programme needs to move through every layer of the business.
- The back-story does work that a CV can’t. Clydebank council flat, undiagnosed dyslexia, no school qualifications, MBE in 2020, honorary doctorate in education from Bournemouth University in 2024. Senior leaders and front-line staff end up listening to the same talk for different reasons.
Biography highlights
- Founder and Managing Director of SMASH IT!® Training.
- Appointed MBE in 2020 for services to small business.
- Awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Education by Bournemouth University, 2024.
- Author of Secrets of Successful Sales (WHSmith Top Ten business book; named by The Independent in 2019 among the top business books written by a woman) and SMASH IT! The Art of Getting What YOU Want.
- Named one of the UK’s Top 10 Business Advisers by Enterprise Nation; TEDx speaker; business expert on The Apprentice: Unfinished Business; regular contributor to BBC Breakfast and BBC Radio.
- Clients include Sky, Discovery Channel, EasyJet, the NHS, the European Commission, Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy, CBRE, Specsavers, Currys, St James’s Place, Porsche and Renault.
Biography
Most change programmes are written to land in the boardroom. The work of making them stick sits three layers below, in the everyday decisions that keep standards consistent when the strategy slides have been filed away. That gap is where Alison Edgar does her work.
SMASH IT!® Training was founded after twenty-five years in corporate sales at BT and Yell. The Yell years were the formative ones. She watched Yellow Pages, once a fixture in almost every UK home, lose its market because the leadership chose not to react to Google. Before that came an earlier career managing hotels in Cape Town and Sydney. The training business grew into something broader than sales.
At the centre of the work today is the Intrapreneur Mindset: Alison’s term for what it looks like when employees think and decide like owners inside a large organisation. The Big Balls® framework sits alongside it, giving managers a prioritisation language for work that all feels equally urgent. Clients include Sky, Discovery Channel, EasyJet, the NHS, the European Commission and Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy.
The credibility behind the frameworks is unusually well-documented. She was named one of the UK’s Top 10 Business Advisers by Enterprise Nation, appointed MBE in 2020 for services to small business, and awarded an honorary doctorate in education by Bournemouth University in 2024. Two books sit on the record: Secrets of Successful Sales, named by The Independent in 2019 among the top business books written by a woman, and SMASH IT! The Art of Getting What YOU Want. She is a regular BBC contributor, including as a business expert on The Apprentice: Unfinished Business, and is quoted across The Telegraph, The Guardian and The Sunday Times.
The practical test of any speaker for a serious organisation is what survives the following Monday. Alison Edgar is booked repeatedly by Sky, the NHS and the European Commission because the language she gives a room keeps showing up in meetings weeks later.
Key speaking topics
- Leadership accountability
- Leading change and change fatigue
- Intrapreneurship and ownership culture
- Standards and everyday execution
- Customer experience and service culture
- High-performance teams
- Sales leadership and commercial behaviour
Ideal for
- Senior leaders accountable for consistent performance across transformation programmes.
- CHROs and CPOs building accountability and standards in hybrid or multi-site organisations.
- Commercial and sales leaders looking to raise conversion through team behaviour without expanding headcount.
- Organisations running large all-hands or leadership off-sites where the same message needs to reach the C-suite and the front line.
Audience outcomes
- A working definition of accountability that lives in everyday behaviour and survives the next restructure.
- The Big Balls® prioritisation framework applied to real work, so teams stop treating every task as equally urgent.
- A shared language across leaders, managers and front-line staff for ownership and consistent standards.
- Intrapreneurship tools that let employees act like owners inside the existing structure.
- Language and tools for handling change fatigue, including what to do when a team has already checked out of the next transformation.
Talks
A working session for senior leaders on the conditions that let ownership thinking take hold across teams after a change programme is launched.
Key takeaways:
- Leadership communication that stays clear and consistent when a change programme is already in flight
- Role-modelling accountability in roles where the easy move is to delegate it downward
- Embedding intrapreneurial behaviour so ownership outlasts the team that introduced it
Alison’s signature session on intrapreneurship as a practical driver of accountability and confident action inside teams.
Key takeaways:
- Ownership thinking applied to everyday decisions a team can take without escalation
- The shift from hesitation to confident action in roles close to the customer
- Shared accountability as the mechanism that keeps standards consistent
A session for organisations mid-transformation, treating change as a design problem at the team level.
Key takeaways:
- The real cost of passive resistance to organisational change
- Managing change fatigue and internal friction without reverting to blame
- Adaptability built through practised behaviours that stick beyond the keynote
A session for organisations whose customer experience is drifting between departments and losing its signal at the point of contact.
Key takeaways:
- Where customer experience most often breaks down inside the organisation
- Handling difficult customer interactions without escalating them
- The everyday habits that turn a customer-service culture from aspiration into practice
Videos
Testimonials
Fees
| EUR | GBP | USD | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Home Country | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| Asia Pacific | €12000 to €40000 | £10,001 - £35,000 | $15000 - $50000 |
| Europe | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| Middle East & Africa | €12000 to €40000 | £10,001 - £35,000 | $15000 - $50000 |
| South America | €12000 to €40000 | £10,001 - £35,000 | $15000 - $50000 |
| United Kingdom | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| US East Coast | €12000 to €40000 | £10,001 - £35,000 | $15000 - $50000 |
| US West Coast | €12000 to €40000 | £10,001 - £35,000 | $15000 - $50000 |
| Virtual | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |