Currently Open to - Non-exec, Chair and advisory roles.

After nearly two decades building hedgehog lab, I stepped down as CEO at the end of 2025. I am now taking a breath, exploring new horizons and rediscovering who I am beyond the singular identity of founder.

When you build something for twenty years, it becomes hard to know where the company ends and you begin. Stepping away has meant rediscovering the edges of my own identity. It is uncomfortable and quietly exciting in equal measure.

What I built at hedgehog lab still matters to me. We grew from two people with laptops and borrowed furniture in a warehouse unit to a global digital product consultancy working across the UK, US and Europe. 

Along the way we raised nearly £10m across three PE transactions, navigated two major turnarounds including Covid and the 2023 market crash, acquired a company, and built a culture that consistently earned recognition as a great place to work. I am proud of what we created and the people who made it possible.

Today I serve as a Non Executive Director at Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, where I focus on digital transformation and governance. I also chair Health Call, a digital health company building products that improve care across the NHS. 

Both roles reflect something I have believed for a long time: technology is most meaningful when it serves people.

I continue to mentor founders and leaders navigating the messy reality of building and scaling businesses. I am also open to advisory and non executive roles, and curious about what else lies beyond the horizon.

If any of that resonates, I would love to connect.

Sarat Pediredla

📢 Some BIG news from me to begin 2026! 

After almost nineteen years at hedgehog lab, I have reached the moment where it feels right to step aside and make space for the next chapter of leadership. 

This company has shaped almost every part of my adult life. It has stretched me, grounded me, humbled me and given me more purpose than I ever expected when we started with two laptops, some broken furniture and a warehouse unit that rattled in the wind.

The journey has been full of moments I will never forget. The early scrappy wins that convinced us we might actually make it. The years of learning how to lead while building a culture that felt human. The surreal milestones where we found ourselves working with global brands or opening new offices. The tough seasons too, from painful restructures to the burnout I walked through in 2023 and 2024. Each high and low shaped me in ways I am still processing.

What stands out most as I look back is the people. There are far too many to thank in a single post, and I am not going to spam your feed with a long list, but please know this. I will reach out to each of you, because none of this would have existed without the countless hands, minds and hearts that helped build what started as a twenty five year old’s pipe dream.

I believe now is the right time to hand over the reins. I am proud of the Executive team we have built. They bring clarity, energy and a renewed sense of direction and I have complete confidence that they will take the company further than I ever could. I will step down as CEO immediately and support the business as an Advisor for the next twelve months.

As for what comes next, I am going to slow down. My family has carried the weight of my ambition and identity for many years and they deserve more of me now. 

After some rest, I will take my time exploring where I want to spend the next 20 years of my professional life. In the short term, I am open to advisory and non executive roles, so if you feel my experience could help, I would love to talk.

I leave with immense gratitude, pride and joy. Titles change. Chapters close. But once you learn to be the hedgehog, you never quite stop. 

#foreverahedgehog

Sarat Pediredla 

CEO & Founder in Consulting w/ PE experience | NED & Chair | Scaling digital companies through culture, growth, turnarounds & transformation | 🏆 AI 100 UK | 🏆 BIMA 100

💡 Excited and nervous to share this finally! I've had this idea for 10 years. I'm finally building it.

If you've spent the last three years running a consultancy or agency, you know how hard it's been. I've watched friends make redundancies they never thought they'd have to make. Studios closed. Founders burn out or sell for less than they deserved.

And through all of it, the tools that were supposed to help? Most of us see them as a necessary evil at best.

I'm building something different. A thinking partner for consultancy leaders, not another database to administer.

It's called thredspan. Professional Services Intelligence.

We've got 3 early pioneers helping shape what this becomes. I'm looking for 7 more to complete a founding cohort of 10.

I wrote about why in this article. If you run a consultancy or agency, I'd love to know if it resonates.

#thredspan #seearoundcorners #focusongreatwork

For 19 years I ran hedgehog lab, a digital product consultancy. And for most of those years, I wrestled with a problem I couldn't solve. It wasn't the

Open article: thredspan - Building Professional Services Intelligence by Sarat Pediredla • 3 min read

thredspan - Building Professional Services Intelligence

Accenture acquiring Faculty for billion dollars (or so) is one of those deals that tells you more about where the market is heading than about either company individually.

Faculty has spent a decade building something genuinely AI-native. Not AI bolted onto existing services, but AI as the foundation. Their work with the NHS during COVID, their safety work with OpenAI and Anthropic, their decision intelligence product. This is what it looks like when AI is the starting point rather than the add-on.

The signal here is clear. There is no separate “AI market” anymore. AI is simply how technology gets built now. Every digital product, every software platform, every consultancy engagement will be AI-native or it will be irrelevant. The days of AI as a distinct service line are ending. It’s becoming the water, not the fish.

Marc Warner becoming CTO of the entire company is the tell. This isn’t a tuck-in acquisition. This is Accenture admitting they need to rewire how they think about technology from the top.

The question is whether Faculty’s culture and approach can survive inside a 784,000-person organisation built around a very different model. Specialist acquisitions by large consultancies have a mixed track record. The thing that made them special often gets absorbed into the machine.

What I find most interesting is what this signals for the market. If Accenture needs to acquire AI-native capability rather than build it, that says something about the opportunity for consultancies that are AI-native from the ground up. 

Plenty to still play for. Feels like the mid 90s with the Internet. Exciting times!

For most of my early years at hedgehog lab, I was the primary commercial driver. 
 
When I co-founded the company in 2007, I did not think of myself as a salesperson. I was a technologist who happened to start a business. But the work needed to come from somewhere, and for most of the journey, that responsibility sat with me.
 
I originated most of our key accounts. I led the pitches. I built the relationships that turned into long-term clients. For a long time, I thought this was just what founders did.
 
Over 18 years, I learned a few things that might be useful if you are in a similar position.
 
𝗟𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗯𝗲𝗮𝘁𝘀 𝗽𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴. The best opportunities I ever won came from understanding what the client actually needed, not from presenting what we wanted to sell. I used to walk into pitches with a deck full of capabilities. The wins came when I put the deck down and asked better questions. What is the real problem you are trying to solve? What does success look like for you personally, not just the business? What have you tried before that did not work?
 
𝗥𝗲𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽𝘀 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝘆𝗲𝗮𝗿𝘀, 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗺𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗵𝘀. Some of our biggest clients came from connections I made five or ten years earlier. Not because I was strategically nurturing them, but because I stayed curious about people and kept showing up. Consultancy sales is a long game. The founders who treat it as transactional tend to struggle.
 
𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗿𝗲𝗽𝘂𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝘀 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗽𝗶𝗽𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲. We spent years chasing new logos before I understood that the clients who already trusted us were the real growth engine. Referrals and repeat business built most of what we became. The energy I put into new business would have been better spent making existing clients genuinely successful.
 
𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝗯𝗲𝘆𝗼𝗻𝗱 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗳. This was the hardest lesson. I was comfortable being the commercial engine. It felt safe. But it also meant the business depended on me in ways that were not sustainable. I started building broader commercial capability later than I should have. If you are the founder and you are also the primary seller, that is fine for a while. It is not a permanent strategy.
 
If you run a consultancy and you recognise yourself in this, you are not alone. Most founders I mentor carry the same weight.
 
The path to distributing commercial responsibility is not obvious. But I think it starts with being honest about the dependency.

Deprogramming Good Girls 🔥 Psychologist 🔥 Coach 🔥

You know that voice in your head that says, “Be nice,” “Don’t take up too much space,” and “Maybe add one more qualification to be taken seriously”?

Yeah. I know it well.

I’m Michelle Minnikin – psychologist, guide, author, and recovering Good Girl.

After decades of overachieving, people-pleasing, and trying to be the right kind of woman in workplaces built for men in grey suits, I finally called bullshit. I stopped contorting myself to fit broken systems – and started helping others do the same.

Now I work with high-achieving women (and the organisations they work in) to deprogramme the internalised conditioning that keeps them small – and to come back to real power.

Not the Lean In version.
Not performative confidence.
And not leadership training that tells women to fix themselves to survive systems that exhaust them.

My work starts from a different premise:

Women don’t need fixing. They need to remember who they are.

I help people rebuild self-trust, set boundaries without hardening, speak from truth rather than performance, and lead in ways that don’t cost them their sanity.

This is not about becoming someone new.
It’s about coming back to yourself – and learning how to stay there.

I blend psychology, magic, and mischief to create transformation that actually lasts.
That means evidence-based strategy, ritual when it helps, and plain speaking when it’s needed.

I’m the creator of:
•	Good Girl Deprogramming – the book, the framework, the movement
•	Rise Above – a long-term liberation container for women ready to lead without self-abandonment
•	A growing body of rebellious IP that challenges norms and shifts culture from the inside out

What I believe:
•	Women aren’t broken – the systems are
•	Confidence isn’t taught, it’s remembered
•	If you have to shrink to succeed, it’s not success
•	Liberation is contagious, and joy counts as a KPI

I work with individuals, teams, and brave organisations who are done with performative D&I and ready for real, systemic change. 

It’s not for everyone. And that’s the point.

If you’re looking for fluffy empowerment talks and pastel worksheets, this won’t be your thing.
But if you’re ready to unravel the lies you’ve been fed about worth, work, and womanhood – we should talk.

We’re not tweaking the rulebook.
We’re burning it and writing something better.

📩 michelle@deprogramming.company

Michelle Minnikin

We’re on the BBC!
The brilliant team at BBC Radio Newcastle have turned our conversation with Anna Foster into a podcast episode!

It’s 19 minutes of me and Caroline Bowmer chatting about:
✨ The story behind Good Girl Deprogramming
✨ How we met
✨ What we’re up to next…

Tune in here: https://lnkd.in/eUbNyQcb
(And yes, I know LinkedIn will hide this post now that I’ve included a link. Worth it.)

Good Girl Deprogramming® | Helping women remember who they are and come back to themselves | Organisational Psychologist & Author

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