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Welcome to Ferndale Consultancy
Ferndale Consultancy was founded by husband-and-wife team Jo and Jon Edwards, bringing together decades of experience in driving growth, transformation, and value creation across both financial and professional services sectors.
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Combining complementary expertise, Jo has built her career helping financial services organisations scale, innovate, and navigate regulatory complexity, while Jon has successfully grown and exited a professional services business and now advises firms on profitability, growth strategy, and business value creation.
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Together, they offer a unique blend of strategic insight, commercial acumen, and hands-on leadership experience. Having worked with organisations ranging from start-ups and owner-managed businesses to established firms and challenger brands, they understand the challenges of growth from both an executive and founder perspective.
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Their shared focus is simple: helping ambitious businesses identify opportunities, build strong foundations, and achieve sustainable, profitable growth.
About Us
Ferndale Consultancy is a boutique advisory firm specialising in supporting small and medium-sized financial and professional services businesses.
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We help ambitious firms scale sustainably by identifying growth opportunities, enhancing profitability, developing new products and services, and executing strategic change programmes. Our approach combines commercial insight with deep regulatory awareness, ensuring growth is both effective and compliant.
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Whether you are looking to accelerate expansion, strengthen operational foundations, or prepare for a future sale or investment event, we provide the strategic guidance and practical support needed to achieve your objectives.
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From building scalable operating models and governance frameworks to supporting due diligence and exit readiness, we help businesses create the foundations for long-term success and value creation.
Jo Edwards
Jo is a senior financial services leader with over 20 years of experience helping organisations grow, transform, and create value. Her career spans fintechs, building societies, specialist lenders, and private equity-backed challenger banks, where she has held executive leadership roles across strategy, commercial, product, operations, and risk.
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As a former Director of Strategy, Jo combines board-level strategic thinking with practical delivery expertise. She has a proven track record of identifying growth opportunities, improving profitability, launching new propositions, and building the operational and governance frameworks required to support sustainable expansion.
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Jo is recognised for her ability to rapidly assess complex businesses, gain credibility with stakeholders, and deliver meaningful outcomes. Whether supporting growth, transformation, regulatory change, investment readiness, or exit preparation, she brings a balanced perspective that combines commercial ambition with sound risk management.
Jon Edwards
Jon began his career in financial services before transitioning into the legal sector where, after practicing as a solicitor, he grew and successfully exited a specialist boutique law firm.
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Drawing on first-hand experience as both a practitioner and business owner, Jon understands the challenges and opportunities faced by professional services firms at every stage of growth. He has a proven track record of identifying the key drivers of profitability and creating strategies that deliver sustainable, long-term value.
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Many founders and partners are exceptional specialists in their chosen field, whether law, accountancy, marketing, or consulting. However, building and scaling a successful business requires a different set of commercial and strategic capabilities.
Jon helps business owners step back from day-to-day delivery, assess the effectiveness of their business model, and identify practical opportunities for growth and improvement.
Combining entrepreneurial experience with strong commercial acumen, Jon provides clear, pragmatic advice that helps professional services firms scale with confidence, improve performance, and maximise business value.
How do we work
No two businesses are the same, which is why we tailor our support to your specific needs and stage of growth.
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Whether you require an initial strategic review, fractional executive support, ongoing advisory services, or hands-on assistance with a growth or transformation programme, we can provide the right level of expertise and involvement.
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Our approach is flexible and adaptable, allowing us to evolve our support as your business grows and your priorities change.
What are people saying
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Marcelino Castrillo-CEO Shawbrook Bank
I worked closely with Jo during her time as Director of Strategy at Shawbrook Bank and saw first-hand the impact she had on shaping and delivering our growth ambitions.
Jo brings a rare combination of strategic insight, commercial acumen and execution discipline. She has an exceptional ability to cut through complexity, identify the opportunities that matter most, and align stakeholders behind a clear and achievable plan. Her work consistently helped us make better decisions, prioritise investment and translate strategy into measurable business outcomes.
What sets Jo apart is her ability to combine board-level thinking with a practical understanding of how businesses actually operate. She quickly builds credibility with executive teams, challenges constructively, and creates momentum for change.
Any organisation looking to accelerate growth, sharpen its strategic focus or navigate a period of transformation would benefit greatly from Jo's expertise. I would not hesitate to recommend her.
Muhammad Farmer- Founder new bank
‘Jo added significant value in the RBP process, especially around the operational requirements. A great person to work with.’
Sally Gaudion- Chief Customer Officer at Nottingham Building Society
‘Jo brought significant value to a complex transformation programme. Jo’s collaborative approach enabled them to build credibility quickly across senior stakeholders, while their strategic insight and sound judgement helped bring clarity, pace and direction to a challenging and often complex environment. Jo made a meaningful contribution to the programme and was a trusted and effective partner throughout.’
Sharon Flaherty- CEO of Folk
Jo has supported us on several occasions. Initially on helping us take a step back and look at the market, we were competing in to see where we should strategically focus our efforts on standing out when we were time poor. In more recent times, Jo has provided consultancy on a growth opportunity we identified where we could better serve the financial services market. Jo was invaluable in helping us to again take a step back and help us stress test our assumptions on what problem our product was solving. From all the times we have worked together, I can say Jo has several strong suits: One being the ability to help people focus strategically and make decisions based on evidence not just gut feel but she also has an uncanny ability to get things moving and done. It’s rare to find a do-er and a strategic thinker in one person. You need two people to do this job but Jo straddles both always thinking about the growth opportunities and helping you get there fast too.
Nottingham Building Society
Risk & Resilience Transformation
Supporting a major transformation programme, providing specialist expertise across risk, resilience, technology, and regulatory change. Working with internal teams and external consultants to strengthen operational resilience capabilities and support wider strategic transformation initiatives.
New Bank Licence Application
COO Advisory Support
Provided executive-level operational leadership during a banking licence application, helping shape the target operating model, strengthen regulatory readiness, and ensure alignment between strategy, governance, and operational delivery.
Propensio (Quilam Capital Portfolio Company)
Fractional Strategic Advisor
Partnering with the executive team to drive growth through new product development, scalable operating models, and enhanced routes to market. Supporting the business in building the foundations required for sustainable long-term expansion.