I had the extreme good fortune of working with Sarah for over a year while I was at Gilt Groupe. It was shortly after I had been promoted to GM and Founder of Gilt Taste, and I was wrestling with all the challenges of a startup business, combined with the stakeholder management needed to thrive within a larger firm. I needed thought-partnership and guidance on how to build a business and a team; on where to focus my time and how to enrol others in stretch goals; on how to grow a business without running myself into the ground. That’s where Sarah came in – she was my coach and advisor through a very challenging and exciting period of personal and professional growth. We meet weekly for over a year and the time we spent together was instrumental in me being able to successfully launch that business.

Sarah is a uniquely talented coach – smart, insightful, deeply experienced in growing businesses, and genuinely caring. Also, she has the ability to get through to very tough, resistant senior leaders in a way that I have seen anyone else do. I have recommended her many times already to colleagues. Everyone I know who has worked with Sarah has the same high opinion of her. I recommend her without reservation to any leader looking for help with their leadership or their business.

Early in 2017, Uber APACx started working with Lime to help us mature our culture and our leadership. This project is truly transformational, enabling us to move into the next phase of our growth while building on the qualities that made Uber great – amazing innovation, a focus on growth, a passion for our customers. One of the most important aspects of our work with Lime is coaching for senior business leaders. I am delighted to be one of them.

Lime’s approach is quite different. Because they are partnering with us in broader business change, the coaching is all about helping individual leaders and the organisation to develop together. Simultaneously, I have been deeply understood personally and assisted in enhancing the culture around me. I have been challenged, inspired and supported in equal measure. We are all seeing the benefits in terms of working as a mature business and focusing on our top priorities. Lime has a knack for cutting through complexity, seeing the key issues and helping us to address them for ourselves. Anyone looking for coaching partners to create transformation that really makes a human difference in a real business context should take a good look at Lime.

Sarah stands out from the crowd. Her insight, her direct, clear style of communicating, her ability to apply the ‘soft skills’ in a practical, results-oriented way. We had more than one disagreement along the way; discussions from which I inevitably learned and for which I am now grateful. Through a combination of analytics, robust conversation and persistence, she coaxed me and my team to do things differently and it got the results we needed.

I engaged Lime early in 2017 to support me and the leadership team of Asia-Pacific to mature our leadership, our culture, and our operating rhythms. At Uber in Asia, we are focused on continuing to get better at meeting the diverse needs of our customers across the region. Lime have played an important role in helping us understand the different viewpoints and experiences of our teams, clarify priorities, and strengthen cross-functional collaboration. They did not attempt to apply popular (and often trite) management guru theories to our organization. Sarah and her team collected primary data – and lots of it – from myriad stakeholders inside our organization and from our customers to paint a highly informed and relevant picture of how our team works and where we can improve to become more effective.

The Lime Group helped us to unlock new and better ways of working together. They aren’t just strategic on paper – Sarah and her team have an amazing ability to understand and move the practical levers that make the biggest difference – quickly. I intend to work with them again in the future and would highly recommend them to any leader seeking to improve his/her organization.

I first had the opportunity to work with Sarah from Lime as a participant in two separate leadership offsites during my time in the Institutional & Business Banking team. Sarah had been engaged by both the EGM of IT and the (then) new EGM of Business and Institutional banking product team to help refresh their visions and strategies. Both off-sites were aimed at lifting the performance of the leadership team. I was extremely impressed by Sarah’s skill in facilitating through difficult conversations, and in her understanding of the business and how it related to changes in the broader industry. I was also impressed with the level of pre-work and planning that went into these sessions and how my input always found its way into the agenda. Because of this, when my role changed to support another leader in the bank, this time in technology, I recommended Sarah and Lime. Over the next 18 months, I worked closely with Sarah as we planned quarterly offsites, and a comprehensive coaching program run by Lime. Sarah has consistently impressed me with her energy, insights, and quality of her work. Unlike most consultants, Sarah and her team talk straight, do what they say they will do, and ‘roll up their sleeves’ to help get the work done. The coaching I received over 5 months was immensely helpful to me in thinking through how to get the best results in my role, and where I wanted to take my career next.  I changed how I thought and felt about my work for the better.

I initially engaged Sarah and the team at Lime in late 2015 to help me with a program to engage and develop my leadership team. That first engagement was so successful that it lead to several others and we worked with Lime for 18 months in total. In 2016, I was asked to shape a Digital Strategy for Microsoft Australia. This meant us thinking very differently. We needed to create a platform for digital transformation in a business that was already stretched operationally and had no time appetite for deep thinking. Lime helped us identify what we wanted to achieve and navigate through the steps to operationalise it across the Services and Enterprise teams of Microsoft.

If I were to pick one word that stands out to me about Lime’s impact it would be clarity. Lime’s clear thinking and structured approach to complex problem allowed us to form the core of a strategy that people understood and could execute on. Some of the work that was done by Lime that really stood out was:

• Relentlessly driving to clarity, pushing me and my team to a point that made it clear what we were going to do, but more importantly what we weren’t going to do.
• Lime has the ability to reach people and get them to think differently. We certainly had a group of leaders that were in a crowded, short-term mindset. Taking them out of ‘today’ to look at tomorrow was challenging, but Lime was able to create this journey along with true ownership and empowerment
• Lime’s ability to synthesise and align the many digital project running simultaneously within the business meant we were driving to a single new digital approach, not different agendas. This was critical.
• Lime were not just experts in the work that they do, but had a full understanding of the business, its model, its future, the gaps and the industry it operates in. I really appreciated this as I was able to move forward confident that we had considered the current business and the impacts that this new strategy could have.

I will work with Lime again and would recommend them highly to any senior leader facing a complex strategic or organisational problem.

Sarah is one of the most gifted executive coaches and organizational consultants I have ever encountered. I first engaged her over five years ago (while at Gilt Groupe) to help with several leadership development and alignment challenges. I was so impressed by the results she achieved that I have continued to call on her for help with my most difficult leadership challenges. She is able to get results in a short time frame with smart and opinionated senior leaders who have not responded to other types of interventions. More than that, she brings a combination of clear thinking, direct talk and humor that makes her a pleasure to work with. I would recommend her without reservation.

Until I met Sarah and Lime, I did not work with organizational consultants because I didn’t see the value.  She changed my mind.  It is rare to come across someone with the combination of pragmatic business savvy and deep understanding of the human and cultural dynamics that drive performance.  Sarah worked with the senior team at Gilt, and with several other key leaders, over a period of two years.  During that time she impressed me with her ability to transform the performance of leaders through coaching and facilitation of team events.  I would recommend her to any senior executive seeking to lift the performance of their team.

Sarah was my coach and advisor for 18 months during a 3 year assignment as the President and General Manager of WPIX, Tribune Media’s flagship, market #1, broadcast property in New York. I was chosen by the CEO Peter Liguori to turn around this legacy New York broadcast outlet and transform the model to create new audiences and revenue streams. It was very challenging implementing a contemporary approach and digital innovation transformation within a very traditional culture and media firm. I wrestled with simultaneously building an all new, strong leadership team at WPIX, managing corporate stakeholder relationships with more conservative views on the path forward, and shifting the culture.

Sarah was hugely helpful as a guide, thought-partner and support through this time. Her deep insight into human behaviour helped me decode the team dynamics around me and make better, much more deliberate choices. She is a very clear thinker, and helped me cut through all the noise to identify what mattered in each situation. I always looked forward to and enjoyed our time. We had regular coaching conversations but Sarah was always available at short notice outside of those if I needed to work on something urgently. I would highly recommend Sarah to any senior leader seeking coaching and advisory support.

We first hired Sarah to help us manage a project with a large, senior team that had very different perspectives on the strategic direction of the initiative. The work had stalled and our project team was spending more time trying to ‘heard cats’ than focusing on the content. Within a week, Sarah had transformed the situation. Her work to immediately realign the team based on their personal and professional motivations removed the logjam and let us get on to the real work of building a business strategy to transform the industry. Without Sarah, it never would’ve happened.

We’ve turned to Sarah and her team at The Lime Group several times since then with similar results. I wholeheartedly recommend Sarah, especially when the stakes are high and you need to get people to perform.

At Uber APACx, we have achieved amazing things and created a whole new way to do business. But, as we move into the next phase of growth, we recognize the need to mature our organization. The priority is evolving our culture, processes and leaders – and Lime is a critical part of helping us do that. Coaching members of our Regional Leadership Team has been one of the most high-impact aspects of the work with Lime – and I have been delighted to be a part of that.

Lime’s approach got underneath the surface to help me make the most of my potential. They are never afraid to challenge, to ask provocative questions, to ‘tell it as it is’ in service to my goals. But while doing so, they are always supportive and inspiring. Their support is pointed towards helping me as well as the wider business. Most of all, they have enabled me to create unexpected possibilities for the future. I have found Lime’s coaching to be a potent driver of change – and will be delighted to work with them again.

I was delighted to be part of the CBA Payments Platform Extended Lead Team and to participate in Lime’s “Unleashing Team Performance” programme from late 2016 to mid 2017. This programme focused on reenergising the culture and leadership within CBA’s Payments LT to promote and enable a robust and flexible platform for future demands and growth. What differentiated Lime’s approach was the ability to deliver complex concepts simply and to make them relevant such that each LT member was able to embody the learnings and filter out to their respective teams. Having recently moved roles within CBA, these learnings are just as applicable to my new team and I am continuing to share the value of these messages.

Another key ingredient was Lime’s ability to personalise the programme for each individual LT member. Not only was each LT member fully consulted and their input incorporated into the overall strategy of where we were going as One Team, each of us was supported by extensive individual coaching. This enabled me to apply and integrate the insights from the programme and also to explore and develop unique additional learnings applicable to me individually. My Lime coach, Janette, supported and challenged me through some key discoveries and awarenesses which have positively impacted me professionally and also empowered me personally. The One Team experience was one of individual growth in a context of team alignment.

Working with Lime stretched me to be accountable, not only for myself but to assume a shared accountability for the wider team. If you want stretch, fundamental positive change and to tap into deeper personal resourcefulness and potential, I would recommend that you talk to Lime.

I first met Sarah when a friend of mine convinced her to assist me for a day—one day. My friend realized I found myself in a difficult environment at work. Sarah spent eight hours with me and I was simply floored at her ability to help me craft a plan in such a short timeframe. She comprehended the conundrum my business faced, the dynamics and personalities of the leadership team, the organizational complexities, AND my personal goals, dreams, gifts and stumbling blocks. She has an amazing way of getting to the core of issues, but in way that is empathetic to the players involved and the situations they find themselves in. She sees right through to the reality quicker than you might believe possible. And somehow when she tells you like it is—she does it in a way that you can hear instead of blocking it out.

Sarah doesn’t come with standard answers. She is incredibly clever and creative at crafting solutions that are applicable for you and your unique situation. To top it all off, Sarah has an infectious personality and energy-level that encourages those around her to engage and solve the issues at hand. She will work with you, not at you.