Anne Gray – Solutioneers™ Founder and CEO
Anne Gray is the Founder and CEO of Solutioneers, as well as a speaker and guest expert on the topic of customer experience-led digital transformation. If you’d like to book Anne as a speaker for your event, please get in touch here.
Anne started her business consulting career at a Telecommunications Expense Management (TEM) consultant and quickly rose through the ranks until she was offered the Operations Director role on the senior management team.
She developed, productised, and scaled a managed services offering, as well as created and implemented reliable systems and repeatable processes.
As a result, the customer lifetime value increased exponentially, because customers could be assured that their expectations were being met consistently and the service became indispensable.
One could say that Anne took to the Operations Director role like a fish to water; an intriguing turn of phrase, given that her Honours Degree was in Fisheries Science and Marine Ecology. Her university years were spent in the science labs — formulating hypotheses, testing and experimenting, analysing findings and presenting conclusions. This may seem worlds apart from the realm of business, but this training in the scientific method and academic rigour would come to serve her well as a business consultant.
After several years at the TEM consultancy, Anne enrolled in a Post-Graduate Diploma in Management at GIBS, which she completed while simultaneously guiding the company through a significant transition.
By 2018, Anne had created such value for the company that she had become an equity partner. But she was presented with another problem.
She was leading a telecommunications company at a time when the market was moving towards data. Even though the move to Teams and Zoom hadn’t happened yet, she recognised that her company’s focus was squarely on voice communications — whereas the market was heading elsewhere.
Anne realised that she had to innovate if her company was to remain relevant in a disrupted market.
She mapped out a strategy to move the business forward, using the technological tools of the Fourth Industrial Revolution — and that’s where Solutioneers originated.
Solutioneers began as a subsidiary of the TEM company, going beyond expense management solutions specifically in the telecommunications sphere and venturing into broader business strategy solutions and digital transformations.
In 2021, Anne completed the GIBS MBA, where she specialised in digital transformation. She chose to focus her research on defining a success measurement model for digital transformation. She had discovered that there was a lot of research on why digital transformations fail, and even more research on what needed to be in place for a successful digital transformation — but very little on how to measure whether a digital transformation was successful.
Anne did a qualitative study that placed her in the offices and boardrooms of many of the top CEOs, CTOs, and CIOs in the country. During the interview process, she uncovered a range of strategies for digital transformation and ultimately developed a success measurement model for digital transformation.
So while the world of marine ecology seems very different from the world of digital transformation in business, there are also many similarities. Both must be based on sound academic research. Both require accurate measurement of where we are now, where we want to be in the future, and a clear plan of how to get there. Both need an advisor, a driver, a champion.
Anne Gray has been that champion for her own company, as well as a long list of other companies — from small startups to big corporations, and many other types of companies in between. You can read more about the results she’s achieved for startups, retail chains, and financial services companies here. Anne takes great care to ensure that the recommendations she presents to her clients are thoroughly backed by recent research, while still being ideally suited to the client’s unique context.
And if you arrived here wanting to know more about Anne’s personal life, then here’s the deal. Anne is married to Dan. They have a daughter. Her name is Fran.
OK, they have a daughter, but her name does not rhyme with those of the rest of the family! But now that you’re breathing a sigh of relief, why not take this moment to contact Anne to talk more about how she could support your company through a digital transformation? Or how she could coach your CXO so that your company can become the customer experience leader of your industry? Together you can discover whether working with Anne and the Solutioneers team would be a good fit for your company.
Book Anne as a Speaker
Anne Gray is available to speak at conferences, be a guest expert panellist, or share her expertise with your board, in the media, or on podcasts.
Possible topics include:
- Why start with CX when planning digital transformation?
- How to plan and measure the success of digital transformation.
- Why company culture must be primed for digital transformation to succeed.
- Fill the pits, elevate the moments that matter. Making your customer journey memorable.