Travel used to play a big part in Thomas Davies’s life as director of global partnerships at Google Cloud, selling products to multinationals and mid-sized companies. “I know airports pretty well,” he says, as he reflects on frequent European trips from his London office.
Typically the father-of-three would wake up at 4am to catch an early flight. “The romanticism of travelling goes quite quickly,” he says. Another bugbear was the number of internal meetings he had to attend, sometimes as many as 11 a day.
Eventually, he started to wonder: what next? Sessions with an executive coach gave him a chance to pause and reflect. In fact, he liked the process so much that he became an accredited coach himself. Coaching helped him to nurture a germ of a business idea — or as he puts it, a vague suspicion that “there was a challenge that could be solved”.