About Lea Jovy

I’m a strategic advisor, senior executive and founder working on the gap between what organisations say they value and what they actually do in practice.

Before the interim work

I left the 9-5 back in 2004 with my own Plan B (to become a personal trainer and holistic health coach). What followed was fifteen years of building things from nothing, most of it before “location independent” was a hashtag: a blog documenting the whole thing that ended up covered by the Guardian, the BBC, Cosmopolitan Sweden, the Sydney Morning Herald, and a feature by Oliver Burkeman in his column “This column will change your life”.

I built an online school and tech helpdesk for women who’d been told the technical side wasn’t easy for them to understand. The UK’s first national conference for professional illustrators, run two years running. A one-day event called 1K in 1 Day, 2012, that did exactly what it says – helped 1,000 women get a website up and running in just 1 day.

Then in 2020, mid-pandemic, I co-founded an EdTech company. I built the entire team (of 30+) from scratch, then later managed out the Head of People I’d hired into it. We scaled to an eight-figure valuation in under 18 months. I left when the environment stopped being one I could keep building in – a decision I’ve made more than once, on principle and on instinct.

The work

My day job is interim executive leadership – usually as a COO, sometimes as a transformation lead, occasionally as a CEO. I take on organisations that need to change quickly and credibly: ones in crisis, ones outgrowing their original model, and ones whose stated values and operational reality have drifted apart.

I started in global consulting at Accenture, where I learned how large organisations actually work – and how the gap between what they say and what they do gets institutionalised. Two decades later, that gap is still what I work on, in smaller and more mission-driven organisations, with a sharper view of what closes it.

Alongside the interim work I advise leaders and boards on operational design, equity and equality, governance, and the systems that bring stated values to life. And I write and speak about individual, collective and systemic ‘truth’ and integrity.

That same throughline is why I also work directly with individuals: Build Different and 1K in 1 Day exist because the gap I’ve spent years closing for organisations is the same one most people in the world of work keep putting up with – what they say they want to build for themselves versus what they’ve actually got in motion.

What I think

Most organisations have stated their core values…very few have built the operational, behavioural, and governance systems that actually live those values when the pressure is on. The gap between the two is where most of the harm in modern institutions happens — and where most of the work I deeply care about lives.

I’m not interested in leadership-as-personal-brand, change-as-optics, or equity-as-performance; I’m interested in what it actually takes to develop leaders and build organisations that hold up under stress — and in being clear, in public, about where they don’t.

Selected recent speaking

Progressive Education: Education Past, Present, Future, April 2026 — Closing presentation and evening session with Noah Heaton on building better pathways into the world of work and adulthood for young people, drawing on the POP Hove pilot.

Ashoka Changemaker Summit, Hamburg, 2024 — Moderated the panel “Building Ecosystems of Change from Within: How and Where do we Start?” with Stephanie Brobbey and Nani Jansen-Reventlow.

The rest

I’m based in Brighton & Hove, on the south coast of England. I’m a single parent to two home-educated teens. I’m neurodivergent, gay and from the global majority; all of which inform how I think about collective and systemic design. I play padel and beach volleyball for fun, though I take both incredibly seriously.

Update: September 2026 is the start of a year-long wander around East and Southeast Asia with three teens in tow (my two plus a bonus teen!). I will be working on my laptop as I travel.

Get in touch

For interim, advisory, speaking, or media enquiries: lea@leajovy.com