About

MANAGEMENT CONSULTANCY SERVICES

Hexagon Gold Advisory

Hexagon Gold Advisory is a management consultancy using coaching as our primary methodology. We work with founder-led and family-run businesses following significant change: a capital injection, a period of rapid growth, a leadership succession or transition. Our goal is to stabilise performance, reduce key-person risk, and build systemic capacity into human systems so they don’t break under pressure. Our approach is evidence-led and commercially grounded: precise enough to identify where behaviour is creating execution risk, and practical enough to change it.

cropped HEXAGON GOLD ADVISORY

Coaching as a methodology.

ICF accredited behavioural change coaching informed by neuroscience and ACT built on over two decades of professional experience across international financial services, risk, and people dynamics in complex organisations.

ashleigh hayden bio burnout research square 1

Ashleigh hayden, pcc

I grew up in Zimbabwe, where agriculture is the connective tissue of communities, families and livelihoods. What I absorbed growing up was less about farming and more about what it means to build something under genuinely uncertain conditions. That context has shaped how I think about pressure and the impact it has on productivity and profitability.
I arrived in the UK in the early 2000s and spent two decades working in financial services, training in asset-based lending, qualifying as a cost management accountant, working as a tax specialist serving high-net-worth clients in a global arena. I’ve learned that the decisions that matter most are rarely visible on the balance sheet.
I burned out, invisibly, in the way that people who work well under pressure tend to. Retraining as a coach gave me an understanding of the structural conditions that make depletion predictable and the changes that make it preventable.

Hexagon Gold

The name, hexagon gold, was inspired by Dr Lucy King’s research in Kenya. Her team found that subsistence farmers in Kenya could protect their crops from migratory elephant demolition using beehive fences. This small, precise intervention protected and diversified their crops which increased the farmers’ income and long-term resilience. This is our model: precise, targeted, behavioural interventions to reshape the human system.

The bee doesn’t look like a match for the elephant. That’s what makes it effective.

Credentials

What sits behind our work.

The International Coaching Federation’s Professional Certified Coach credential requires a minimum of 500 evidenced coaching hours and independent assessment of coaching proficiencies. This standard distinguishes trained, assessed practitioners. For you, it means our work is held to an ethical and professional framework.

This approach draws on two evidence bases: neuroscience research into how the brain responds under pressure and threat, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), a behavioural framework with strong clinical and organisational research behind it. In practice, this means we work with how people actually respond under stress – not how they hope to – and build behavioural changes that facilitate adaptability and psychological flexibility.

DiSC is a behavioural assessment that maps the behavioural preferences of an individual or a team under pressure: decisions, pace, communication style and relationships. We use this report to shorten the time it takes to identify where communication may break down costing the business and what may need to change.

ResilienceBuilder is an behavioural diagnostic that measures an individual or a team’s capacity under pressure. We use it to identify where a leader or team is most likely to reach their limit and to build the specific changes that extend sustainable performance. It makes the invisible visible before it becomes a problem.

The Chartered Institute of Management Accountants qualification is the professional standard in management accounting and commercial finance. It means the commercial language of this work, margin, risk, execution cost, valuation, is native, not borrowed. We read business situations the way a financially literate operator does.

Two decades working is asset-based lending, tax advisory and financial services in a global context has facilitated an instinct for where the real risk sits in a business and the credibility to have direct conversations about it with founders and investors without losing the thread.

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Change exposes pressure patterns. If you want to protect performance and profitability, start here.

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