Ten Ahead Wins Excellent in Executive Wellbeing & Lifestyle Management 2026

By Georgie Williamson, Founder

Ten Ahead has been named Excellence in Executive Wellbeing & Lifestyle Management 2026 at SME News's Greater London Enterprise Awards, and I'm thoroughly chuffed.

It's a slightly funny thing to win an award for. When what we do is working really well, you can barely see it. Very on brand.

But it feels like a good excuse to answer the question I get asked more than any other: why on earth did you start this?

So here's the story.

Before Ten Ahead, I spent most of my career as a Chief of Staff and trusted adviser, having come to it through psychology and entrepreneurship. For the best part of two decades I worked alongside founders, CEOs and global executives, and somewhere along the way I became the fixer, the sounding board and the person in the know. The one people called when they needed to know who, where or how.

If you've never done the job, it's basically about holding everything. You see what's coming before it arrives, you spot where two priorities are about to clash, and you make sure the person at the centre can spend their time on the things only they can do.

And it's a remarkable thing to watch. The diary is protected, the right papers arrive on the right morning, and the big decision has been thought through before anyone walks into the room. There's proper infrastructure around them.

Then, at about seven in the evening, it stops.

I noticed it again and again. The support that made these people so good at their jobs ended at the office door, even though life at home was often just as demanding. The house move that had been stuck since March. The school application. A parent whose care nobody had properly looked at. The passport that needed renewing in the one fortnight it couldn't be spared.

None of it was beyond them. They could have done every bit of it, and for years most of them did, usually late at night and usually on their own.

It was never a question of whether they could. It was whether they should have to.

The people who spend their lives looking after everyone else are so often the ones with nobody looking after them. And all the while, life kept getting bigger: more choice, more opportunity, more places to go and people to meet, and far more to think about. We'd happily surround ourselves with brilliant people at work, then expect ourselves to have the rest of life completely sussed.

I thought we could do better than that.

So I built Ten Ahead. Every client works with one dedicated Lifestyle Manager, their Chief of Life: one person who knows the whole picture and looks after the personal side of life the way a Chief of Staff looks after a business. That's what lifestyle management means to us. It might be travel planned around the family, or homes, staff and suppliers kept running whether anyone's there or not. It might be finding the right person, making an introduction, or finding something you didn't know existed. And sometimes it's simply talking a decision through that doesn't fit anywhere else, or taking a slightly ambitious idea and running with it.

The glamorous bits are lovely, of course. But a lot of what we do is gloriously unglamorous. The meter readings and the will in the same week. Making sure the broadband actually works before anyone moves in. Finding the right interior designer for the room that's never felt quite right. Life doesn't come in departments, so I've never understood why the help should. Everything we look after comes back to one person.

More than ten years on, the idea is the same as it was on day one: make life lighter, smoother, happier and brighter. Sarah joined me five years ago and now leads our Lifestyle Management work, and every client still has one person who knows them, not a system that happens to have their details. We've kept every client we've worked with over those five years. I'm prouder of that than of any trophy, although I'm very fond of this one.

Why the wellbeing bit matters

I'm particularly pleased the award says Executive Wellbeing, because I think we sometimes get wellbeing a bit wrong.

We tend to answer busy lives with more advice. Sleep more, move more, set better boundaries. All good things. But the people I work with rarely need another thing to be good at. They need some of the load to actually go somewhere.

And when it does, something lovely happens. There's room again. Room to be curious, to start the thing you've been meaning to start for three years, and to sit at dinner with the people you love and actually be there. Success should give you more of your own life, not less.

That's what we're here for.

And the way we know it's working has never been an award. It's the moment, usually a few months in, when a client stops and says, "I hadn't realised how much I needed that."

Because life was never meant to be carried alone.

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