Charlie Dawson

Charlie Dawson is the founder of The Foundation www.the-foundation.com, a consultancy set up in 1999 to help organisations be more successful by being customer not financially led. That means creating value for customers as the first priority and then ensuring commercial success follows so success can be sustained.

His career has been a journey of learning, working out what it takes to put customer-led ideas into practice in the real world. It sounds obvious but it's elusively difficult.

At its simplest organisations find being customer-led hard because people are naturally self-interested, seeing the world from the inside-out. To counter it people need help to see, experience and believe in success that is inherently outside-in, starting with what matters to the people they serve. When this happens people see ways to solve their trickiest growth challenges, attracting and retaining customers by being better at providing what they want and cutting out what they don't.

Charlie was originally inspired by working on a new car company launch that did this by happy accident to great effect. Subsequent years working at The Foundation has led to long relationships with HSBC, Visa, M&S and the Volkswagen Group, and recent projects include helping Jaguar Land Rover keep more customers, helping Morrisons, the UK's 4th largest supermarket, find ways to differentiate and compete strongly in future including developing a strong and authentic purpose, helping eBay get better at creating trust and helping the John Lewis Partnership find a future in Home Services as a customer-centred business.

Charlie started his career working in advertising and has a First Class degree in Manufacturing Engineering from Cambridge.