Dr Alan O'Neill
A transformation programme that leaves behaviour unchanged is not a transformation. Most organisations discover this only after the launch, when metrics fail to move and the same resistance resurfaces. The gap between what leadership decides and what customers actually experience is almost always a culture problem.
Dr Alan O’Neill is a consultant, speaker, and author who helps organisations understand why culture and customer experience are the same commercial lever, and build the structured change capability to use them together.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Dr Alan O’Neill
- The 7-Steps to Profit is a named, proprietary framework built from a multi-year consulting engagement at Selfridges, where annual profit grew from £45m to £200m. Audiences leave with a structured path they can map to their own organisation, not a set of principles they have to interpret.
- His central argument, that culture and customer experience are a single commercial mechanism, not parallel HR and marketing initiatives, gives boards a specific reframing of a decision they are typically making in silos.
- As Managing Director of Kara Change Management, he draws content from active client engagements across retail, hospitality, FMCG, financial services, and the public sector. The material is current, not archival.
- Organisations that have already bought the tools and run the pilots need adoption, not awareness. His keynote AI Won’t Transform Your Business. Your People Will. sets out why AI and other change programmes stall below the C-suite, and which leadership behaviours make adoption hold.
- Four published books (Premium Is the New Black, Culture Matters, Show Me the Lid on the Box, The Leader’s Six-Pack) give organisations a structured body of work to continue with after an engagement: the thinking does not begin and end in the room.
- A business columnist for the Sunday Independent and Gulf based publications, his frameworks are tested continuously against live commercial situations across multiple sectors and geographies.
Biography highlights
- Founder and Managing Director, Kara Change Management
- Creator of the 7-Steps to Profit framework; deployed across client organisations including Selfridges, Toyota, Intel, Primark, Moët Hennessy, Dubai Duty Free, Getty Images, and the United Nations
- Author of four books: Premium Is the New Black, Culture Matters, Show Me the Lid on the Box, and The Leader’s Six-Pack: How to Balance Grit and Grace (Orpen Press)
- Business columnist, Sunday Independent (Ireland) and Gulf based publications
- Non-executive director across multiple sectors in Europe and the Middle East
- 35+ years of consulting practice spanning retail, hospitality, FMCG, financial services, manufacturing, and public sector organisations across EMEA
Biography
Selfridges’ annual profit grew from £45m to £200m across several years of structured transformation, and the business went on to win multiple ‘Best Department Store in the World’ awards. The consulting framework behind that journey, Dr Alan O’Neill’s 7-Steps to Profit, is what organisations now bring him in to share.
The 7-Steps to Profit is built on a specific argument: that culture, customer experience, and commercial performance are not parallel workstreams but a single, interdependent system. Culture is not the backdrop to strategy, it is the delivery mechanism. O’Neill formalised this thinking across three of his books: Premium Is the New Black addresses customer experience as competitive differentiation; Culture Matters defines the four values (Customer Centricity, Respect, Accountability, and Agility) that underpin a high-performance culture; Show Me the Lid on the Box provides a framework for leading change with reduced resistance.
As Managing Director of Kara Change Management, he has applied the framework with organisations across retail, hospitality, FMCG, financial services, and the public sector, from Toyota and Intel to Dubai Duty Free and the United Nations. The Selfridges story transfers well: the structural argument it illustrates is as relevant to a B2B services firm or a public institution as it is to a department store.
O’Neill continues to practise as an active consultant and non-executive director. He writes business commentary for the Sunday Independent and Gulf based publications, keeping his frameworks in direct conversation with the commercial challenges organisations are currently navigating.
Key speaking topics
- Change management and organisational transformation
- Culture as commercial strategy
- Customer experience and service excellence
- The 7-Steps to Profit
- Premium brand positioning and margin protection
- Retail reinvention and the future of physical retail
- AI adoption and the behaviours that make it stick
- Building enterprise value ahead of an exit
Ideal for
- CEOs and senior leadership teams managing a cultural transformation alongside a commercial or strategic pivot
- Chief Customer Officers and Chief Marketing Officers seeking to embed customer-centric behaviour across the full organisation
- CHROs and HR Directors designing culture programmes that connect directly to business performance
- Executive conferences in retail, hospitality, consumer goods, and financial services
- Business owners and founders considering an exit in the next few years, and the leadership teams around them
Audience outcomes
- A working understanding of the 7-Steps to Profit framework and how to map its logic to their own organisational context
- A reframing of culture and customer experience as a single commercial lever, not separate functional priorities
- Concrete examples drawn from the Selfridges engagement and other named client organisations that show how the framework operates under real conditions
- Greater clarity on where resistance to change typically originates and how structured approaches reduce it at scale
- A sharper diagnostic lens for identifying the gap between leadership intent and frontline behaviour
Talks
Sets out the framework O’Neill built through the Selfridges transformation and later client engagements, and how leaders use it to bring culture, strategy and execution into line.
Key takeaways:
- Why change programmes fail, and how leaders unintentionally create the misalignment that stalls them
- How culture carries strategy into daily behaviour, and why strategy dies in translation
- What execution rhythm looks like in practice, and the tools that embed behavioural change
Shows leaders why AI and other change initiatives stall below the C-suite, and what culture and leadership behaviours make adoption stick.
Key takeaways:
- Where adoption breaks down between the executive decision and the manager asked to apply it
- The culture and leadership behaviours that decide whether a rollout changes how people work
- Actions leaders can take the following week
Shows owners why buyers price transferability rather than profit, and what to change in the 18 to 24 months before a broker is appointed.
Key takeaways:
- Why profit attracts buyer interest while transferability sets the price
- What the 7-Steps to Profit™ changes in a business during the window before a sale process starts
- Two contrasting cases: a 50-year-old family wholesaler rebuilt into a scalable asset, and Selfridges, which commanded a multi-billion premium while not on the market
Examines culture as a competitive asset that cannot be copied, and sets out what it takes to build one that sustains high performance across the organisation.
Key takeaways:
- A practical definition of the four values – Customer Centricity, Respect, Accountability, and Agility – and how to evaluate them in your own organisation
- The direct link between values, behaviours, employee engagement, and commercial outcomes
- A framework for strengthening culture as a genuine source of competitive advantage, not a communications exercise
Makes the case for customer experience as the primary commercial differentiator in an era of transparent comparisons, and shows how to embed a service culture from boardroom to frontline.
Key takeaways:
- Why product and price alone no longer differentiate – and what does
- A practical model for building consistency in service delivery across B2C, B2B, and public service environments
- Case study examples from the Selfridges engagement and other named organisations that illustrate what the shift looks like in practice
Challenges the prevailing narrative about the death of physical retail and presents a more precise analysis of what is actually driving success and failure in the sector today.
Key takeaways:
- A clearer diagnosis of the structural forces reshaping retail, beyond the headline narrative about online disruption
- Why bad retailing is dying while retailing itself is not, and what separates the survivors
- Practical lessons drawn from successful retail case studies, including Selfridges
Addresses the practical reality that most change programmes fail not for strategic reasons but for human ones – and provides a framework for leading change that reduces resistance and increases adoption.
Key takeaways:
- The most common reasons well-designed change programmes stall or collapse
- Practical strategies for managing resistance, building engagement, and sustaining momentum through transition
- A communication and implementation approach that takes people with the change rather than around it
Equips commercial teams to move away from price-led competition by building the confidence and capability to sell on value.
Key takeaways:
- Why margin erosion is often a culture and positioning problem before it is a market problem
- Practical tools for articulating and communicating added value in competitive sales environments
- Greater confidence in protecting and rebuilding margin without compromising on customer relationships