ABOUT US
We started ALCHEMY because we kept seeing the same problem. And we were pretty sure we could fix it...
We’ve spent decades in leadership, inside global corporates, investment companies and start-ups. We have been in their boardrooms going through the best and hardest moments a business can face.
We’ve seen brilliant deals come unstuck because of leadership teams that weren’t assessed properly. We’ve watched founders struggle through transitions that nobody helped them navigate. We’ve sat in rooms where everyone could see the problem but nobody was saying it out loud.
We built ALCHEMY to say it out loud, and to do something about it.
The premise is simple: leadership is the variable that determines whether a portfolio company hits its targets or misses them. And yet it’s still the variable most investors assess last, least rigorously, and most often on instinct. We exist to change that.
CEO
Sarah Cawthra
Sarah brings 25 years of C-suite experience in global corporates and investment companies, with a career spent at the intersection of leadership effectiveness, culture and commercial performance.
She has led through transactions, navigated acquisitions, and supported leadership teams through the kind of high-pressure, high-stakes environments that PE-backed businesses tend to generate in abundance. She knows what it takes to perform at the top of an organisation, and what it looks like when the conditions aren’t quite right.
Sarah is warm, precise, and exceptionally good at reading what’s actually going on in a room.
CHIEF ALCHEMIST
Catherine Hall
Catherine brings deep expertise in business psychology, a sharp commercial mind and a healthy impatience for anything that doesn’t translate directly into better leadership and better results.
She specialises in how strategy needs to be translated into leadership capability to succeed, the gap between what a business needs to do and whether the people leading it can actually do it. It’s a deceptively simple question. Getting the answer right takes real expertise.
Catherine combines rigorous psychometric assessment with the kind of commercial judgement that only comes from years in and around business at the highest levels. She’s known for being direct, insightful, and, when the situation calls for it, disarmingly funny.
Together We Are Better
OUR OWN ALCHEMY
We are a complementary pair. Between the business psychology and the C-suite experience, the analytical rigour and the human insight, we see the full picture, and we're not afraid to share it.
We work with PE and VC firms across London, the UK and Europe, and with the leadership teams of portfolio companies at every stage of the investment lifecycle. Much of our work comes through repeat relationships and introductions, which we take as the clearest evidence of how we operate.
We take the work seriously. We don't always take ourselves seriously. And we believe that getting leadership right is one of the highest-value things an investor can do.