"A man with new ideas is a madman, until his ideas triumph."
Steve is a natural born problem solver and an advanced practitioner in managing successful programmes. With over 40 years of experience in the public sector, he understands the practical reality of creating the right digital strategy for large and complex digital transformation. He’s won awards for the improvements he’s made, excelling at tailoring strategies to the business situation while fixing underperforming services while keeping a keen eye on the customer and user experience.
He is an advanced practitioner in Managing Successful Programmes (MSP), Management of Risk (MoR), and ITIL. He holds an MBA from Manchester Business School, specialising in Management Consultancy, Quality, and Customer Service. In addition to his consultancy work, Steve serves as a Board Member at Leeds Federated Housing Association.
Steve recently developed The Marzipan Way, a unique approach to 360-degree digital implementation covering human-centered design, digital technology, digital transformation, and good governance.
His inspiration is to be found in a creative, honest and hard-working approach. He’s an archetypal Yorkshireman: grumpy on the outside, fiercely protective of his family (including his newest grandson), and loyal to local sports teams like Leeds United, Hunslet, and Yorkshire Cricket, despite their ups and downs. Whenever he’s not at work, Steve enjoys walking, watching horse racing and the pleasures of good wine.
Phil recently joined Golden Marzipan as a Director. He’s been around the block and had many different technology leadership and consulting roles, picking up a few tricks and a good bit of learning along the way (not always failures).
He’s done the hard, messy stuff, leading complex transformation programmes and overseeing tricky managed services into Government and Health clients. But he’s also made sure he’s worked on innovation, design-thinking and running fun workshops and leading client consulting engagements. While he’s had lots of experience leading teams, more recently he’s been working in a CIO advisory capacity with diverse clients across many different sectors. With this mash-up of experiences he hopes to offer valuable benefit to Golden Marzipan’s clients.
Outside of work, Phil is married with 3 sons and is proud to be Irish and living in West Yorkshire. He plays guitar now and again, mainly dabbling with classical guitar pieces and has discovered walking football as a new hobby after too many 5-a-side injuries. He also does a bit of volunteering and is studying AI governance.
"Impermanence makes everything possible."
Nicola brings a professional, structured approach to understanding technology and delivering complex programmes. Having spent her career in the private tech sector, across both large corporates to early-stage startups, she has led multi-product portfolios, operational improvements, and cross functional technology initiatives. A key focus area has been on customer and partner technologies to drive engagement, support self-service and increase customer satisfaction She decided to leave the corporate grind in mid 2025 to focus on something more meaningful and initially joined Golden Marzipan as an Associate Consultant.
Her calm and empathetic manner can be attributed to a 16 year ashtanga yoga practice– a personal project of dedication, exploration and a daily lesson in resilience.
She lives between London and Italy where she co-owns a yoga retreat centre in Puglia, the creation of which required risk taking, being outside of your comfort zone, and above all cultivating patience! Outside of this she enjoys travelling all over Europe, accompanied by her small poodle, Ziggy, also known as the “Tiny Terror”.
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
"What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what difference you want to make."
After working in social and supported housing for over 20 years, Claire decided to use her outgoing, creative personality to focus on involving and engaging people in how we develop services. Using fun, interesting techniques, Claire ensures engagement is inclusive and so that tenants, residents and frontline colleagues have the opportunity to have their say. With a background in mental health and learning disability services, Claire is skilled at focussing on people’s strengths and building confidence. She is firmly committed to high quality involvement in which power is shared between the housing provider and the people making homes in their services.
Claire has an in-depth knowledge of the issues around equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) and is a keen and active ally for all marginalised groups. Although not recognised as a protected characteristic, Claire has a particular interest in the impact of poverty and social mobility. Claire’s work on EDI was assessed as ‘industry leading’ by the National Equality Standard. Claire uses this approach in engagement work to reach ‘seldom heard’ voices.
Claire is an avid reader, an enthusiastic traveller and a reasonably adept crafter.
“It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.”
With over 25 years of experience working at a senior level in both service leadership and change, Louise has a strong track record and reputation for making a difference to individuals, teams, and organisations. An MBA graduate and practitioner in Change Management, Managing Successful Projects, Agile and Prince2 Project Management, Louise brings experience from many different specialisms, including IT, digital product development and implementation, merger and acquisitions and large-scale people re-structure to name a few.
With a passion for travel, Louise loves to explore some of the world’s most beautiful locations – enjoying a glass of wine and delicious local food along the way.
“85% of the reasons for failure are deficiencies in the systems and process rather than the employee. The role of management is to change the process rather than badgering individuals to do better.”
Linda is an established executive property director in the social housing sector and comes with breadth and depth of experience in commercial asset management, mobilisation and transformation of maintenance/FM services, and implementation of support systems for service operations.
Her expertise lies in designing and implementing organisational structures, systems and practices to deliver effective business results and excellent customer services. She excels at aligning property and maintenance strategies with organisational goals, empowering teams to take charge of change. Turning strategy into operational reality by using and developing existing organisational capabilities and fostering a culture of continuous improvement.
She has worked in the public and private sectors in consultancy, client, and contractor organisations. As a consultant, she has developed some of the more innovative PFI, Estate and procurement strategies for large, often national, organisations such as DWP, HMRC and MOD Estates. As a contractor she has mobilised national FM contracts and shepherded dozens of housing association and LA DLOs into the private sector,
Now, she is focused on guiding organisations through their biggest property challenges—whether that’s consolidating resources post-merger, establishing sustainable asset management practices, or ensuring seamless building safety compliance in an ever-evolving regulatory landscape. In her spare time, Linda enjoys walking, sailing and reading
“When people feel safe and free to think in different ways, to explore and create, they liberate parts of themselves they didn’t know existed. True self-actualization involves this kind of freedom—freedom to think, to imagine, and to be different."
Stephen brings contemporary experience of the challenges and opportunities facing social housing providers, having worked in the sector for 30 years, and at executive level for well over a decade.
He has significant strategic and operational expertise in housing management and maintenance, asset management, development and regeneration, business intelligence, governance, and stakeholder engagement. He continues to support housing providers and other social purpose organisations as a consultant and non-executive director.
Stephen is blessed (or possibly cursed) with an insatiable desire to ask ‘why?’, questioning the way things are done and to what end. This has led him to a particular focus on organisational purpose, culture, and service design. He supports organisations to align service delivery and performance measurement with strategy, fostering a culture of curiosity, continuous improvement, and reflective practice. He was involved in the roll-out and piloting of consumer regulation and supports organisations to embody the principles of the Consumer Standards in their strategies and plans.
In his spare time, Stephen spends as much of his time as possible outdoors – walking, looking after his allotment, and generally enjoying nature.
It’s well known that we’re a friendly bunch at Golden Marzipan and we love nothing more than welcoming new people into our community of housing professionals who all have a passion for effective change. If you would like to:
