From account director to accrediting a profession.
Simon's NLP journey began in London as an Account Director, mentored by Una McLoughlin at SITEL, where he first became fascinated by human behaviour and communication. In 1998 he became Head of Global Telebusiness at an international management consultancy, working with organisations including American Express, Citibank, British Airways and Visa across multiple continents — and came to recognise that businesses often neglected the human element that real transformation depends on.
In 1999, Simon established his own consultancy and training business in Cape Town, serving blue-chip organisations across South Africa and Europe while pursuing formal NLP studies. Along the way he observed a fragmentation within the NLP community — conflicting schools of thought, inconsistent content, no shared standard — and connected with practitioners around the world who shared the same concerns about rigour, research and the need for collaboration. That collective vision became the International Federation of NLP, officially launched in 2024.
“To know that he gave more to this world than he took from it” is how Simon describes his life's goal — a “#Give-A-Damn” ethos he lives out with his team, built on the belief that individuals shape outcomes far beyond themselves through thought-driven action.