I’m a Commercial Director and brand strategist with over a decade of experience aligning sales, marketing, and communications to help businesses thrive. Throughout my career, I’ve guided companies through ambitious growth phases, rebrands, and team transformations, always focusing on creating cultures where people feel motivated, valued, and excited about what’s next.

In previous roles, I acted as a fractional marketing and brand consultant, partnering with leadership teams to refine brand identities, recruit high-performing marketing talent, and embed streamlined sales processes. I also co-founded Tiny Wizard Studio and Alchemy Branding Studio, discovering my passion for telling meaningful brand stories and nurturing people-first teams.

Today, I’m fully immersed in leading one organisation’s commercial function, uniting sales and marketing to drive sustainable growth and strengthen brand relevance. I believe real success isn’t just about meeting revenue goals. For me, it’s about building an environment where fresh ideas can flourish, people can grow, and everyone can take pride in the impact they make. If that resonates with you, let’s connect. ✨

I spent an incredible week last week in London hot-footing it to as many Wales Week / London events as I could manage, and met some incredible people and businesses doing amazing things. 

Huge thanks to Dan Langford OBE & Mike Jordan for hosting the partners' dinner on Tuesday evening and for the wonderful introductions throughout the week. I should have taken far more photos, but I was too busy chatting!

Really looking forward to getting to know you all better and congratulations to all the organisations who put on such wonderful events. Ligtas Consultancy & Training will certainly be hosting something brilliant for 2027, but for our first year as partners, it was great to be a guest. 

Great to meet all of you, and apologies for the ones I haven't tagged. 

Football Association of Wales Nick Payne Catryn Newton Chelsea Pinches-Burrowes Chris Butt Rebecca Edwards- Symmons Hannah Shackleford Ann Ellis Gruff Dodd, ACA Adrian Coles Professor David Brooksbank Natasha Hale Andrew Howard Belinda Houghton-Jones Rhys Morris FIEP Rhys Pendergast andrew tugwell Sonia Hensley Francesca Carpanini Chart.PR Frankie James Dawn Evans Nicola Parry  Steve Western, Cert CII, DIP CII, CeMAP Lee Gillen Vladimir Jankovski Tenovus Cancer Care / Gofal Canser Tenovus Jayne Brewer Assoc CIPD Charlotte Leyshon Blanche Sainsbury

Jess Morgan

Commercial Director at Ligtas | Co-founder at Alchemy | Driving brand, marketing & sales alignment for people-first growth | Believer in bold storytelling, behavioural-led leadership & culture that connects ✨

Walking is where I do my clearest thinking. Not in a dramatic, “found myself on a mountain” sort of way. Just a proper walk, some fresh air, and enough headspace for my brain to stop tab-switching.

I've realised the view is absolutely the motivation. It’s the reason you start.
But when you’re halfway up a hill, you’re not really living in the view yet, are you? You’re thinking about your pace, your breathing, whether you should’ve brought water, and why your knees have suddenly decided to have an opinion. 😂

Work feels a lot like that. We love the summit moments: the launch, the growth, the promotion, the milestone. They look great in a photo and they’re worth celebrating. But the part I’m always most interested in is how people actually got there, because it’s rarely a straight line and it’s almost never as polished as the final result.

That’s why I love doing the podcast. It’s why I love networking events and chatting to people from all walks, industries, and backgrounds. The real gold is usually in the parts people skip over: the tough decisions, the uncertainty, the stuff that didn’t work, and the tiny turning points that changed everything.

And it’s the same reason storytelling matters so much in brand and marketing. People don’t connect with the “ta-da”. They connect with the climb. They trust the effort, the learning, and the humans behind the outcome.

The view is great. But the story is what gets people to walk with you in the first place.

Really pleased that Ligtas Consultancy & Training is an official partner of Wales Week London 2026, and I’m really looking forward to spending some time in London at the end of February!

If you haven’t come across it before, Wales Week / London is a programme of events celebrating Welsh culture, business and talent, bringing people together across sectors for talks, panels, socials and (from past experience) some very good conversations.

I’ll be there for a few of the events, including the partners’ dinner with other sponsors and partners. For me, it’s a great excuse to step out of the day-to-day, meet interesting people, and listen to what others are building and learning.

If you’re going along too, give me a shout,  would be lovely to say hello.

More info and the full programme are on the Wales Week London site: https://walesweek.london/

I’m just going to leave this here…

If I had a penny for every time someone (not just women) say ‘I’ve been so lucky’, ‘luck has been on my side’, ‘it’s all down to luck’ I’d be a bloody millionaire. 

We need to start giving ourselves more credit for the work we’ve put in, the risks we’ve taken, the sacrifices, the late nights, early mornings and the downright; screw it, I’m going to give it a go and see what happens moments. 

Own it. You deserve to take credit. 💪

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Out and about again this week, visiting our valued clients! 🥳 Yesterday I had one of those site visits that reminds you why this work matters so much. 

I can’t share who the client is, and the tour was strictly NDA (fair enough, it was a proper behind-the-scenes operation). But it was genuinely impressive.
What stood out most was how many moving parts manufacturing sites hold at once: people, processes, equipment, contractors, shift patterns, constant change. Safety can’t sit in a folder somewhere. It has to live in the day-to-day.

That’s why Ligtas Consultancy & Training's work with manufacturing clients is usually “joined-up”: assess the risks → support the actions → train people properly → keep it maintained. 

One of the pain points they’ve had is probably familiar to a lot of manufacturers: training spread across different suppliers and portals, fragmented reporting, and no simple way to answer basic questions like who’s done what, where the certificates are, and when refreshers are due.

So alongside our risk assessment and consultancy support, we’re now building them an induction LMS portal to bring training into one place across all sites, with clear visibility, consistent standards, and reporting that doesn’t rely on chasing spreadsheets.

The bit I’m most excited about? We’re also transforming key policies and procedures into short, role-relevant induction courses, so there’s real data on who’s completed what and evidence that people have actually engaged and understood it. Less “it’s in the folder”, more confidence that there aren’t gaps.

If you’re managing safety across multiple sites and training feels fragmented (or impossible to track properly), I’m always happy to compare notes, because you’re definitely not the only one dealing with that.

🎙 Episode 10 is Live  🥳 Jay Ball  on Building, Selling, Retiring… and Starting Again

New episode of Brand To Scale is now live.

We're back after a short break. This Month I sat down with Jay, founder, exit-success story, and now CEO of Flotek Group Limited to talk about what building at scale actually looks like.

No “overnight success” BS, this…

• Getting sacked early in your career
• Building a telecoms business from 21
• Selling it at 34
• Retiring at 35
• Realising six months later you can’t sit still
• Starting again and scaling to £19.5m in three and a half years

Jay talks about:
• Growing through acquisition (14 deals and counting)
• Why debt isn’t always the villain
• The difference between a business owner and an entrepreneur
• Leading when you don’t always get your own way
• Why culture changes as you scale
• AI vs automation and why most businesses are confusing the two

If you’re building something.
If you’re scaling.
If you’re questioning what “success” even looks like once you’ve tasted it.

Hope you enjoy!

🎧 Listen here:
https://lnkd.in/dDweR8tk

I love this quote from George Bernard Shaw:
“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

Clear communication isn’t about saying more things, or saying them louder, or adding another meeting to the diary.

You can send the updates. You can hold the meetings. You can repeat yourself politely (and still somehow feel like you’re the one being difficult).

And yet… people still walk away with different versions of what was “agreed”.
That’s usually because clarity isn’t volume. It’s intent.

People don’t just need information. They need context. They need to know what actually matters, what good looks like, where they fit, and what the point is in the first place.

Nine times out of ten, the fix isn’t another meeting. It’s a clearer message.

Care homes sit in one of the hardest positions I see anywhere.

You’re responsible for people who often can’t self-evacuate, in buildings that weren’t designed for the level of need they now support, under legislation that’s well-intentioned, but still evolving in how it’s meant to work in practice.

And then we hand huge responsibility to home managers and say:
“Just do the checks. Review the assessment. Keep it compliant.”

But compliance isn’t the same as being safe.

But many of the people we ask to do this have never been properly taught what “good” looks like at a practical, everyday level.

👉 What matters on a fire door check?
 👉 When is an extinguisher a risk as well as a safeguard?
 👉 What does a “reasonable” check look like for this building, with this staffing ratio at night?

Overloading managers with responsibility they can’t reasonably carry doesn’t make anyone safer.

The care providers doing this best are clear about:
👉 what decisions sit with managers (and what don’t)
👉 what training is essential (not excessive)
👉 where specialist judgement needs to sit elsewhere in the system

Question: what’s the biggest pressure point for you right now, training relevance, manager capability, legislation clarity, or the gap between compliance and real safety?

We see this a lot, highly capable people being asked to complete training that’s technically correct, but disconnected from the hazards they actually deal with day to day. When training reflects real processes, real materials, and real risks, something changes.

👉 People engage.
👉 They recognise themselves in it.
👉 And competence becomes practical, not theoretical.

We saw this clearly when working with a biotechnology manufacturer, where training was built around their specific objectives and hazards not generic scenarios lifted from a slide deck.

The feedback that stuck with me was this:
“Providing bespoke content relevant for our objectives and hazards which staff can better relate to.”

That’s the bar, in my view.
Not more training.
Better training.

If you’re in manufacturing, what’s the biggest challenge right now? Making training relevant, keeping it up to date, or ensuring people can actually apply it on the floor?

The case study is here if it’s useful:
https://lnkd.in/exQSyxhH

When I visit sites or sit in team meetings, I’m reminded that what makes Ligtas Consultancy & Training strong isn’t just technical knowledge, it’s the people. We get this feedback from clients all the time, they love who they work with. And when you join the team here, you'll be supported by a passionate, curious, willing to challenge and always willing to support. 

This blog captures that better than I could in a short post. We gathered feedback from across the business to showcase what life is really like here. 

I'm super thrilled to say that we’re growing, and we’ve got some exciting vacancies open at the moment. 

But the fit matters just as much as the CV.

If you’re someone who wants to work in an environment that blends consultancy, training, and real-world impact and you like being around people who genuinely care about doing things properly, it’s worth a read.

👉  https://lnkd.in/ewm2hfvh

I used to think growth was about doing more and moving faster. More leads, more meetings, more content, more outreach…more of everything.

If that was the magic formula, we’d all be unstoppable. What I’ve learned is that growth is far more sensitive to the conditions people are working in than the effort they’re putting in. You can have a great team and plenty of activity, and still stall if direction, priorities and expectations aren’t clear enough to guide day to day decisions.

I’ve written a longer piece on this, based on lived experience and patterns I’ve seen across businesses. There’s a simple test at the end you can try with your team this week.

Enjoy!

I used to think growth was mostly about pace. If I’m honest, being a busy fool, managing more busy fools. You can guess what that leads to, right? If 

Open article: Everyone Wants Growth. Hardly Anyone Builds the Conditions for It by Jess Morgan • 15 min read

Everyone Wants Growth. Hardly Anyone Builds the Conditions for It

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