An independent practice, built on senior experience from inside the systems it now works across.
I'm Hayley, the heart and the human touch behind The Hayes Collective. I built it because I believe strong, supported people build strong, supported organisations, and because I would rather listen, challenge and build something with you than hand you a template and call it a day.
Outside of work I'm a mum to three, a wife and a daughter, enjoying every moment of what often feels like life's biggest joyride, at least on reflection.
Hayley Hayes, Founder of The Hayes Collective
An independent consultancy led by Hayley Hayes, working alongside organisations that are doing complicated things with limited room to manoeuvre, and that want help that is practical, people-centred and genuinely theirs at the end of it.
The practice exists because high-quality consultancy tends to reach the organisations that can already afford it. Every organisation deserves access to support that helps it keep striving forward, with a clear focus and impactful outcomes. Tiered pricing is not a discount scheme; it is the reason the work can reach the places where it changes most.
Work is delivered by Hayley directly. Where a piece of work benefits from a second perspective, associates are brought in for defined parts. They are named, scoped and visible in the fee, rather than a team that appears at pitch and disappears at delivery.
Strategic commissioning leadership in local government, including in severely financially constrained conditions. Deciding what evidence was credible enough to act on. Telling genuine need from asserted need, which is rarely comfortable and always consequential. Working out what could survive procurement, what a provider market could realistically deliver, and what would actually make a difference to somebody.
That work included independent reviews of contested provision, holding to the evidence under pressure to reach a tidier answer, and recording uncertainty rather than filling it with something more convenient. It is the sort of experience that is very hard to acquire from outside a system.
It is not an argument that institutions get it right. A good deal of the work is testing them. Knowing how decisions are actually made is what lets me tell a genuine constraint from a habit that has been dressed up as one, and say which arguments will land and which will not.
The same discipline applies wherever a consequential choice has to be made on imperfect evidence. In a public body, help getting past strategy to something that survives finance, governance and delivery. For organisations trying to influence those systems, an honest read on where the decision actually sits. In a business or a founder-led organisation, different machinery and the same questions: what does the evidence support, where is the real constraint, and what has to be true for this to hold.
Most of the answer is already in the room. What is usually missing is structure, an outside view and protected time to think. We bring those, then work it through with you. It is co-creation, rather than recommendations handed over at the end.
Everything we produce is something you can use on Monday: a plan, a framework, a template, a map. Not a document that describes your problem back to you in more words.
If something is not working, you will hear it. If you do not need us for a piece of work, you will hear that too. It is said with care, and it is said in the room.
Frameworks, templates, evidence and materials are handed over editable and accessible. Nothing is delivered in a form that depends on us to maintain it.
The approach does not change by sector. What changes is what is contested, who holds the power, and what counts as evidence.
Local authorities, NHS and care teams, and the partnerships between them, including severely constrained conditions where telling genuine need from asserted need is both difficult and consequential.
Growing businesses where strategy, governance or operations have quietly outpaced the structure holding them, and the cost is showing up somewhere else.
Where the founder is the strategy, the relationships and the final say on everything, and the work is making it hold without them in every room.
Trading for purpose, answerable to both a market and a mission, and needing the governance and evidence to hold both honestly.
From grassroots groups to established charities. Tiered pricing means the smallest organisations are not priced out of senior support.
Independent evaluation and evidence assurance where the conclusions need to hold up to scrutiny from outside.
Start with the thing that is not sitting right. The rest can be worked out together.
Practical consultancy for public systems, commercial enterprises, founder-led organisations and community interest companies.