About Birch Strategic Services
We help founder-led businesses scale with clarity, control, and renewed confidence.
You’ve already built something successful.
Now you need the systems, clarity, and leadership to take it to the next stage – without burning out your people or breaking what’s working.
That’s where we come in.
Our Vision
Our vision is to help founders build great businesses, while growing a people-first ecosystem that creates flexible, meaningful work opportunities within our consultancy.
Our Mission
We partner with founder-led SMEs to identify what’s holding their business back and build the systems, processes and operational capability they need to scale. Our fractional COO support is powered by a flexible, people-first consultancy team that creates meaningful work opportunities as we grow.
Meet The Team
Steph is a highly experienced operational leader known for transforming founder-led businesses into scalable, high-performing organisations. She brings over a decade of hands-on operational, commercial and leadership experience-— and has become recognised for her ability to fix what’s slowing businesses down and rebuild the systems that support real scale.
Steph has been invited to speak at major business and scale-up events, regularly sharing her approach to operational performance, people-centred leadership and sustainable growth.
Since launching Birch Strategic Services, Steph has been recognised with multiple awards, reflecting both her impact with clients and her people-first ethos:
- Global Women in Business Award — Consulting Businesswoman of the Year
- Derbyshire Businesswoman of the Year
- Derbyshire Consultancy of the Year
Her work has recently helped a client secure a place on a highly competitive accelerator programme, one of only 14 successful applications out of 93 entrants — a testament to the strength of her strategic and operational support.
Steph’s mission goes beyond scaling businesses. She is building a people-first consultancy ecosystem that creates flexible, meaningful work opportunities for talented individuals — particularly parents and returners — while delivering exceptional results for founders.
Ashlea is the engine behind Birch Strategic Services — a rare blend of capability, consistency and delivery excellence.
She has worked alongside Steph for over 10 years, moving with her across multiple sectors because Steph knows exactly how valuable she is. When Steph launched Birch Strategic Services, Ashlea became the company’s first employee — the person trusted to help build the consultancy from the ground up.
Ashlea absorbs knowledge faster than anyone. Whether it’s a new system, a complex project or a completely unfamiliar operational landscape, she picks it up, understands it, and makes it run better. Her expertise spans:
- Operational delivery
- Project and programme management
- Systems and automation
- Change and transformation
- Process design
- People, communication and culture
- Embedding consistent ways of working
Ashlea is the person who makes sure things actually get done. Where Steph sets the strategy and operational direction, Ashlea turns it into action — with precision, pace and reliability.
Clients quickly realise how indispensable she is. Almost every team Ashlea works with tries to keep her involved long-term after seeing the quality, speed and calm delivery she brings.
She is the reason Birch Strategic Services can offer more than advice — we offer implementation, momentum and measurable change.
Together, Steph and Ashlea form a proven, long-standing partnership that gives founders both the vision and the execution needed to scale properly.
