Sarah Matthew and the bank manager’s question

The bank manager stopped Sarah Matthew and Angie Wiles five minutes into their pitch. They were setting up Virgo Health in 2003, and opening an agency required rather more than a laptop and a cheerful LinkedIn announcement. Matthew remembers the interruption because of the question that followed: “when do you want the money?” Their preparation had made the decision unusually easy.

There is a lovely reversal here. The interruption, usually the dreaded moment in a presentation, became the good news. Before the meeting, the founders had worked through the business they intended to create. The conversation could move from persuasion to practicalities. Twenty-three years later, Matthew still returns to that encounter when talking about what a plan should do.

Her career has since taken her through an acquisition, an international leadership role and another company of her own. Today, as founder and managing partner of The Vibrant Company, she works with leaders and organisations on how they operate. Her subject has become the people around the plan: how they understand it, how they work together and what happens when the next move is unclear.

A commercial education, before the agency years

Matthew began at Johnson & Johnson as a commercial trainee. The arrangement gave her exposure to several parts of a business, including marketing, organisational design and information technology. Looking back, she describes an early opportunity to understand an organisation as a whole. A company, after all, has a habit of continuing beyond whichever department appears on your business card.

She went on to commercial roles at Astra and Glaxo. The move into consulting arrived through an approach from an agency while she was leading a marketing team. She had been pursuing a corporate career, but running her own business remained an ambition. Consulting offered a way towards it. Her subsequent positions included managing director at Shire Health London and Sugar Consulting.

That background matters to the work she does now. She has sat on the client side, run agency businesses and helped start one. A discussion about growth can therefore draw on more than one seat at the table. She knows the commercial brief, the responsibility for delivering it and the additional responsibility of keeping the organisation behind it working.

Two founders, sixty colleagues, a wider map

Virgo was a shared venture. Matthew and Wiles were its founders and joint chief executives, and by July 2012 the London agency had a team of 60. GolinHarris, part of Interpublic, announced that it would acquire the business. Virgo would keep its name, and both founders would continue in their roles. The financial terms were not disclosed.

Matthew’s explanation at the time emphasised compatible values, complementary expertise and a shared culture. The agreement also gave the founders a remit to develop Virgo in North America and beyond, alongside senior responsibilities within GolinHarris. For a business approaching its tenth birthday, the map was becoming substantially larger.

The following year, Virgo received the 2013 EMEA specialist consultancy award in its category. The assessment described 2012 as its ninth successive year of growth and noted new offices in New York and Singapore following the acquisition. A transaction can occupy an enormous amount of management attention. The continuing growth makes this period more interesting than a simple before-and-after sale story.

By February 2016, Matthew was moving from the joint chief executive position into the presidency of Golin’s global practice covering both brands. Rebecca Rhodes became chief creative officer, while Ondine Whittington was promoted to Virgo’s managing director. The appointments distributed responsibility across a wider leadership team as the business pursued international expansion.

The colleagues who carry the story forward

Matthew’s own account of achievement puts considerable weight on what happened to the people she helped develop. In 2021, reflecting on Virgo, she pointed to former colleagues who had moved into leadership across the industry. It is a different way of reading a founder’s record. The business has a history; so do the people who worked there, and their careers continue well beyond it.

The testimonials accompanying her 2017 Communiqué individual award describe someone who combined strategic analysis with approachability. One colleague recalled being persuaded to join within minutes of meeting her, then learning to think more strategically through her mentoring. The same account stressed her willingness to communicate with people at every level. The picture is specific: business judgement made accessible to the team.

That reputation has travelled. Hanover managing director Emma Gorton has described Matthew as an influential mentor, praising her perspective and ability to notice what others miss. Mentoring can be an unobtrusive part of a senior career. It rarely has a launch date or a transaction announcement. Yet it helps explain why a person’s influence can remain visible in organisations they no longer run.

“We, not I”

A Virgo value Matthew says former colleagues still remember.

Starting again, with a different brief

In 2017, Matthew encountered an approach to coaching that prompted a change in direction. She travelled to the United States to train, stepping away from her global executive role. The Vibrant Company followed in 2018. Its work brought together her experience of building businesses with coaching, mentoring, workshops and advice to leaders.

Beginning again after running an established organisation is an interesting career choice. Matthew had already worked through the familiar markers of agency success: growth, a sale and a larger international remit. Her next company concentrated on how leaders and teams think and work. The commercial questions remained, with more attention to the people making the decisions.

The current Vibrant team lists Susan Lohr, Ila Garner-Patel and Barry Holmes as partners alongside Matthew. Its stated ambition is to help organisations operate with clarity and purpose. She also serves as chair of Hanover’s specialist practice, advising its directors and senior team on growth and international development. The coaching work and the boardroom work run alongside one another.

Jellyfish have a business problem

Matthew has an unexpectedly aquatic way of talking about strategy. In a September 2024 appearance on The Unique Boutique Podcast, she compared a business without a useful plan to a jellyfish carried by the waves. The alternative was a swordfish, moving deliberately towards a destination. It is an image with the advantage of being memorable after the meeting has ended.

The conversation also explored client relationships and the expectations that surround consultancy businesses. Her concern was with finding a way of operating that fits, rather than accepting every convention attached to the business model. The episode gives her approach room to breathe: a discussion about direction, authenticity and the assumptions people bring to working together.

Her August 2026 writing pushed the planning question further. Financial targets, she argued, tell a business what it hopes to receive; they leave unanswered what it intends to build for customers. She invited leaders to consider what would remain of their plan if every financial number disappeared. For anyone who has spent days refining a spreadsheet, this is a mildly inconvenient thought experiment.

A map for the moments without a map

Matthew also makes room for situations in which a destination has yet to emerge. Her August 2026 navigation essay sets out a four-part tool based on two questions: whether you know where you want to go and whether you know the way forward. The combination determines whether the task is execution, exploration or first establishing your position.

This is a useful complication in a story that begins with a carefully prepared business pitch. A person changing direction may need a different kind of help from a company delivering an agreed strategy. Matthew’s own move into coaching was not part of an original career blueprint. She has written about following an interesting next step before the larger pattern became visible.

By September, her writing had turned to accountability and blame. She explored how quickly incomplete information can become certainty about another person, and acknowledged noticing that tendency in herself. She paused before publishing the final instalment. There is something revealing in that decision: a communications professional treating the timing and state of a conversation as part of the work.

Her wider commitments include the Savvitas Senate, a volunteer group concerned with women’s participation in business and public life. She is also listed among the presenters for Equity Sherpa’s 2026 business development masterclass for professional services leaders. Both extend the same thread: experience gained running an organisation being put to use beyond its walls.

Matthew’s career now offers several ways into the question that opened it. Sometimes the work is to prepare so thoroughly that a funding conversation becomes straightforward. Sometimes it is to give colleagues room to take responsibility. Sometimes it is to recognise that the next destination needs time to emerge. The bank manager could ask when she wanted the money. The questions she asks leaders today tend to take a little longer.