I'm Laura — founder of Connect Studio™.

Before this, I spent over a decade in strategic marketing at Deloitte and EY. Running marketing, relationship programmes and events across Europe and the UK — often from scratch, across multiple industries and audiences (CISOs, CROs, CIOs, CTOs). One of the more memorable projects: interviewing and producing Dame Kelly Holmes as a hologram at the Natural History Museum as COVID was lifting, as part of the CISO relationship programme. Big, complex, multi-stakeholder work, where the only way to get it done was to read the room, move at speed, and bring people along with you.

What got me through those rooms wasn't a marketing qualification. It was a dance and team sports background.

Before corporate, I trained in dance at De Montfort University and worked as a personal trainer — on land and at sea, on cruise ships. Dance taught me that the same instruction can be understood and expressed in a hundred different ways and that the job of the teacher is to find the version that lands for the person in front of you. Captaining teams and personal training taught me how to read a group, a body, a mood, a resistance. All of it taught me how to move people - physically, then emotionally, then strategically.

Those are the same skills. Whether I'm in a boardroom or a studio, the work is the same: listen first, translate what you hear, and guide people toward something they couldn't quite see on their own.

Why Connect Studio

The name isn't decorative.

Connect came from what was missing in my corporate years. I was leading big-budget programmes across multiple markets and industries but it felt like the real human-to-human interaction, was getting squeezed out. I saw brilliant colleagues dull their shine. Brands struggling to have an opinion in crowded, quick marketplaces. Marketing that sounded like everyone else. Connect Studio exists to put the human back in.

Studio came from dance. A studio is where you become more than you are when you step through the door. It's creative. It's exploratory. It's full of learning. It's the place where you're allowed to try things, to get them wrong, to find your edges. That's the feeling I want my clients to have when we work togethe - not a consultancy, a studio.

How I work

Three words underpin the work: gather, translate, guide.

Gather — I start by listening. Really listening. I get under the skin of why your business exists, who it's really for, what's working and what isn't. No tactics, no templates — just your business, held up to the light to see what lights you and it up.

Translate — then I translate what I hear into clarity. The golden thread that connects your work to the humans you've chosen to serve. One clear story, running consistently across every surface of your business.

Guide — and I walk alongside you as you implement it. Because strategy that sits on a shelf isn't strategy. Strategy that gets lived, is.

Beyond Connect Studio

The same instinct shows up across the rest of my life.

I'm building The Yard — a gathering place in West Sussex for people who want to work, move, and be unfiltered in the same place. It's what Connect Studio is to businesses, but for humans tired of editing themselves.

And on a smaller scale, I'm the one who gets asked to organise the family gatherings. Every year, it's "fake Christmas" — 28 humans across three generations (plus dogs), finding the right house, the right space, the right conditions for all of us to actually be together. Gathering. Translating. Guiding. Same work, different room.

Outside all of this, I spend my days with my (wild) young family, going on fun adventures, tasting delicious ice creams, and hunting down a really great cup of coffee.

Lx