We kept seeing the same gap. So we built the answer.

I started early. As a teenager in Auchencairn, a quiet village on the south west coast of Scotland, I ran a dial-up internet service over a leased line my grandad and I tapped ourselves, then web and email hosting for customers who never knew their provider was still at school. Five ventures followed across internet services, colocation, web design, IT support and cyber security, each one founded, run and exited.

The biggest was the managed technology and cyber security firm Eve and I built into one of Scotland's most reputable, before selling to EE's largest partner in 2021. What made it work was never the technology. It was finding the right goals and the right people, then building the culture that let them get on with it. We did it while raising our daughters, which explains both the missing sleep and most of the joy.

Beyond Yopla I serve on boards including Aberdeen Foyer, the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland and Primary Engineer's advisory board, and I have contributed to the National Cyber Security Centre's CYBERUK. Yopla brings all of it together: self-funded, female-led, sustainability-minded, and built to give organisations the honest picture we always wished our clients had.

I grew up just outside Durham, moved to Saudi Arabia as a teenager, and came back to study Law and Human Resource Management. That led, not entirely according to plan, to project managing international clinical trials for a global pharmaceutical company: trial medication moving across six continents, with data integrity, patient safety and objective parameters that had to hold under real pressure.

From there I ran change management for a communications business with around 3,000 staff, identifying, implementing and measuring changes to policy and practice. Pharma taught me how to deliver. That role taught me something more lasting: however good a decision is, its success is decided by the people who live with it every day. That belief sits underneath everything Yopla does.

In the late 2000s my husband and I took the leap to build our own technology and cyber security firm, in the same years our two daughters arrived. We grew it into one of the most respected outfits in the field, began building software of our own, and sold the business when the time was right. Yopla is what we did next: everything we learned about technology, people and change, aimed at the gap between what organisations believe and what is actually true.