We built Athanor from the inside out.
Athanor Opus is the result of two careers spent inside transformation — one centred on people, leadership and organization; the other on operations, business transformation, program delivery and the systems that turn strategy into reality.
We did not meet as consultants comparing frameworks. We met as operators doing the work.
At Translation, Neil led people and organization across a three-company group while Gillian directed operations and led the rebuild of advertising delivery processes. At Moda Operandi, we worked alongside one another again during a period of significant business pressure, with Neil leading executive and organizational change and Gillian leading core operational transformation.
We learned first-hand that strategy, the people system and the operating system cannot be transformed in isolation. That experience became the foundation of Athanor: one integrated view of how an organization is, how it thinks and how it gets work done.
Gillian Bowling
Founding Partner
Gillian brings more than 20 years of experience translating strategy into execution across healthcare, technology, luxury retail, media, marketing and enterprise transformation. She has partnered with CEOs, CFOs, COOs and cross-functional leadership teams across business transformation, operations, PMO, program delivery, organisational effectiveness and technology-enabled change.
Her career includes building and rebuilding delivery functions, establishing governance and PMO capability, redesigning operating processes, leading complex cross-functional programs, integrating technology and automation, and turning ambiguous business problems into executable change. At Moda Operandi, her analysis identified more than $10M in annual operational and technology risk and led to a three-phase transformation projected to save $7M annually. At Translation, delivery redesign retained $250K in revenue and improved on-time delivery by 20%.
Neil Wilks
Founding Partner
Neil brings 35 years of experience leading organisations through growth, restructuring, reinvention and crisis across four continents. His career includes Nokia, Amazon, SoundCloud, Moda Operandi and Dronamics, where he served as Chief People Officer and Operations Chief of Staff and helped scale the aerospace business from 20 to 180 people, simultaneously securing €70 million in funding.
His work sits where people strategy meets commercial reality: executive effectiveness, organisation design, leadership capability, culture, scaling infrastructure and the difficult decisions that determine whether an organisation can absorb growth. He has advised founders, executives and boards through moments when the human system of the business had to change as quickly as the business itself.
Neil holds a Masters Degree in Human Resource Management.
This is the short version. For the detail, the outcomes, the numbers, the range of what we’ve delivered - read
Most transformation separates organization from the operational reality. We bring them together.
Leadership and culture without execution discipline do not hold. Process and technology without behaviour change do not hold. Strategy without decision clarity does not hold. Athanor brings those dimensions together, not because a model says they belong together, but because our careers have repeatedly shown us what happens when they are treated separately.