Chris Percy

Senior Consultant

Chris has built on broad-based private sector experience to be a leadership advisor to non-profits and education organisations for over a decade. Through multiple trustee and governor roles at charities and schools, he has held chair positions, facilitated meetings to develop consensus around organisational strategies and taken responsibility for recruiting new principals and performance managing senior leaders. 

Through his work with telos and his professional work as a Strategy Consultant advising clients at board level, Chris specialises in several closely related areas: the investor mindset, such as commercial due diligence work for Private Equity houses; market analytics to explore and identify opportunities for growth; and using data and dashboards to bring teams together and drive success. Central to his approach is appreciating the potential of facilitated workshops and semi-structured, iterated conversations to bring out clients’ deep knowledge of their business – and then combining this with targeted analytics and best practice across his triple sector experience. Chris has worked for the World Bank, with Government ministers across Europe and Asia, with major corporates like Jaguar Land Rover, Boots, Virgin Media and Rolls Royce, as well as with charities and start-ups of all sizes.

As a coach and published researcher on career trajectories, Chris is passionate that finding what you want to do and what you’re good at isn’t a journey that stops in your first job. There’s only so much that can be learned online – talking to as many people as possible and trying new things is essential. Having graduated with the top first in Chinese Studies at Cambridge University, Chris soon learned that grades alone will only get you so far. None of us achieve anything much on our own.

Chris lives in London and spends a couple of months a year with his family in Bangladesh. In his free time, he’s always looking for the next adventure, although he might need another year to recover from leading a London-to-Paris relay triathlon team in late 2015 – a three-day feat that included swimming from England to France.