Experience the 4C difference
Unlike traditional consultancies and service providers, we are hands-on doers and implementers, as well as advisors with deep expertise
Our purpose
We empower public and private sector organisations globally to unlock value, drive efficiency, and build resilience across commercial, supply chain, and operations.
Our transformative solutions create sustainable impact, measured by the positive change we enable for our clients.
our values
Our people, values and commitment to sustainability drive our success, forming the foundation of trusted partnerships with organisations worldwide.
Purposeful
We believe in our responsibility to contribute to the greater good, embracing diversity and promoting equity and inclusion. As a BCorp, our sense of purpose goes beyond financial gains, focusing on creating real and lasting impact.
Genuine
We act with authenticity, reliability, and integrity in all our interactions. We seek to build genuine relationships with our clients, colleagues and stakeholders based on trust, honesty, and transparency.
Innovative
Committed
We’re committed to the success of our people and clients, going above and beyond to deliver exceptional results. We invest time and resources to build long-term, enduring partnerships.
how we work
Since 2000, we’ve partnered with leading public and private sector organisations, combining deep expertise with a tailored approach to deliver lasting transformation solving today and tomorrow’s challenges.
Whether improving efficiency, embracing new technologies, or navigating complex change, we design and deliver solutions that reflect each client’s unique context. Our teams bring proven experience and long-term value to every engagement.
OUTSTANDING ACCOMPLISHMENTS
Our awards and accreditations
4C has been recognised by numerous independent organisations for our excellent work, positive environmental impact, and commitment to upskilling employees.





OUR TEAM OF EXPERTS
4C Leadership Team
Our executive leadership team has a wealth of experience and expertise in driving transformative solutions with sustainable impact to our clients.
Vik Sood
Partner
Known for his Big Four experience and strong transportation industry background, Vik brings 4C a unique blend of skills in C-Suite procurement strategy and financial transformations.
Vik started his career in the rail industry, including a number of project management roles within Network Rail and leading the project management function delivering a multi-million-pound portfolio at Alstom. Using this delivery experience, Vik moved into consultancy joining PA Consulting and progressing through leadership roles at Deloitte and Prokura Kearney before joining 4C.
Vik’s main strengths are within procurement, financial transformation, strategic monetisation of services, energy & sustainability solutions, and supplier negotiations across the UK, Europe and the Middle East. He has led complex commercial transformations within the transportation industry, but also wider within the private equity, financial services and leisure sectors.
Vik is an experienced mentor, living our values as a genuine, people-centric leader.
Jeremy Smith
Managing Director
Demonstrating 4C’s investment in our people, Jeremy joined 4C in 2011 as a Manager and progressed to become our Managing Director.
Jeremy brings over 20 years’ experience in international consulting across a wide range of public and private sector clients. Except for a few years in quantity surveying, Jeremy’s career has been consulting focused. Starting as an Analyst in a small operations consultancy, he quickly moved into procurement and worked with leading organisations, including Aviva and Barclays. Jeremy’s career development continued in a boutique procurement consultancy, where he gained global experience in the financial services and oil and gas industries, working with companies such as BP and Shell.
Jeremy has in-depth expertise and extensive experience in leading teams to deliver major international savings projects, transforming organisations’ approach to procurement through category management and SRM and developing operating models, capabilities, processes and systems.
Jeremy joined 4C to combine his consultancy skills with more hands-on practical experience which he gained in Retail and Logistics, broadening our Retail and Private Equity offer into new regions and services. As 4C’s Managing Director, Jeremy applies his people-centric leadership and inclusive approach to drive our growth and continued high-quality service, whilst delivering a positive impact across all our industry practices and making 4C a great place to work.
Allison Ford-Langstaff (FCIPS)
Partner
Allison’s specialism is transformation, vision and and managing change programmes, including cultural change, operating model and organisational design and she is passionate about ‘moving the dial’ in people’s capability to help organisations achieve sustainable success.
Prior to 4C, Allison ran her own consulting business for over 10 years, providing business strategy and commercial expertise to small and medium sized businesses, and charities, as well as selling and delivering multi-million projects and acting as Chief Procurement Officer for several transformation programmes supporting organisations including British Steel, Bridgestone Firestone, Sanoma, Capita, Network Rail, Astellas, DHSC, Sellafield, MOD, Reckitt, Eurostar, Arriva and GSK. Allison’s previous experience also includes leading the Sourcing & Supply Chain function in Orange UK and a CPO role for Wanadoo.
As 4C’s Services lead, Allision works with a team of experts who share their deep expertise, research and insights across 4C, building tools and techniques that enable us to consistently deliver sustainable impact to our clients. She heads up our Early Consulting Careers programme, inspiring those new to consulting, commercial, supply chain and operations roles to find their passion and build their technical and consulting expertise, whilst gaining an appreciation for different sectors
Ebrima Mboob
Gavin Bowen-Ashwin
Partner
Gavin has over 18 years of experience in supporting organisations to transform their supply chains through commercial and operational improvement. Leading 4C’s Retail & Consumer practice, Gavin has extensive experience working with retailers, major operators in the hospitality and leisure sector and food and beverage manufacturers, both in the UK and Europe.
He brings a practical and pragmatic approach focused on supporting organisations to optimise their supply chains from improved SO&P, reduced COGS and more cost-effective manufacturing to ensuring a fit-for-purpose warehousing and distribution solution and right-sized overheads and operating costs.
Whilst commercial value is at the core of Gavin’s work, he is a transformation and change specialist, supporting organisations to plan, design and implement future operating models. Gavin’s experience includes working with UK-based and global organisations, enabling him to gain in-depth perspectives on global versus local operating models, which he translates into client engagements.
Gavin leads 4C’s Retail & Consumer practice supported by a passionate and experienced team of retail, hospitality and FMCG experts who put the customer at the heart of everything we do at 4C. Whether it is reducing the cost of food and drink for a holiday operator to enable their guests to affordably dine out or bringing innovative distribution solutions to retailers to improve the customer delivery experience, Gavin and his team are committed to working collaboratively with clients to deliver sustainable and long-lasting solutions.
Suzanna Hinnell
Chief Operating Officer
With a career spanning consultancy, operations and marketing roles across public and private sectors, Suzanna uses her blend of skills and deep understanding of the consultancy business to put the foundations in place for 4C to grow both in the UK and internationally.
As a member of the leadership team, Suzanna works closely alongside Finance, HR and Legal to deliver support solutions that continue to embed our purposeful, genuine, innovative and committed values whilst growing 4C profitably. Her team provides 4C with Marketing, Resourcing, Facilities Management, Governance and IT support and she also leads our internal sustainability work, pushing 4C to continually increase our positive impact as a BCorp organisation.
Rob Vos
Partner
With an impressive career history having led multiple assignments on delivering digital solutions and supply chain transformations, Rob is our European retail partner. Using his experience in all aspects of transformation, including process design, change management and ICT, he will work to support the firm’s ongoing growth and geographical expansion across the continent.
As a member of the leadership team, Rob is responsible for the successful delivery of transformational projects across its retail practice, enabling clients to become more customer-centric. Rob’s expertise will help us deliver best-in-class services to our clients throughout Europe as we continue to build transformative solutions that create sustainable impact for our clients and society.
Paul Bestford
Partner
Currently based in the Netherlands, Paul has worked internationally across Europe, North America and the Middle East, including 5 years in Switzerland.
Darren Blackburn
Partner
Darren is a consulting leader with a wealth of commercial and procurement experience across multiple industries. He is now wholly focused on supporting government deliver on its key imperatives by delivering the best commercial deals possible.
Darren recently reignited his passion for commercial delivery in the public sector working in the Cabinet Offices Complex Transaction Team. Whilst he was there, he held a pivotal role in the Covid response and led high-profile commercial deals, delivering strong outcomes for communities across the UK. This passion is shared across our Public Sector team who are delivering positive impacts on some of the UKs biggest infrastructure programmes, Net Zero delivery schemes, Defence, Local Authority, NHS and education initiatives.
Andy Hemsley
Partner
He has in-depth expertise in shaping, mobilising and leading complex change using traditional, agile and hybrid delivery modes. He has extensive experience of helping organisations successfully shape and deliver their entire portfolio of change and transformation on a global scale – as well as building their own in-house capability to deliver. As a highly experienced and hands-on delivery leader, he has also led assurance of large and complex programmes to help boards and leadership teams reduce risk and increase certainty of success.
In addition to his financial services focus, having worked extensively across banking, insurance, payments and UK regulators, Andy also has cross-sector experience in consumer products, telecoms, utilities and life sciences. At 4C, Andy is expanding and broadening our Financial Services team, using his industry focus and insights to further develop our team and the impact we make across the sector.
Mark Ellis
Partner
With over 20 years of industry experience and almost the same in consulting, Mark has a deep understanding of our clients’ business challenges. An established leader, Mark has worked with many organisations across the public and private sectors to transform their business operations, enable meaningful and sustained performance improvements and deliver tangible benefits to the bottom line.
Prior to joining 4C in 2015, Mark led IBM’s Procurement Practice first in the UK and followed by EMEA, before becoming the global lead. Mark’s extensive experience includes working with diverse organisations ranging from BP, Shell, BG Group, GSK, Novartis, Logoplaste, Somerset County Council, Metropolitan Police, Essex County Council, Thames Water, Cabinet Office, HSBC, Mondelez International, Unilever and Inditex.
Working in procurement line roles at the Department for Works and Pensions, Transport for London and Canterbury City Council has given Mark a real understanding of the day-to-day challenges of running high-performing teams under pressure, which he translates into practical solutions with sustainable impact.
As well as being the Lead Partner for some of our most complex engagements, Mark leads our Sales and Account Management team, ensuring we deliver a consistently high level of service to our clients that adds real value and delivers a return on investment.
Sally Riley
HR Director
Having worked in a variety of sectors and organisations as well as having delivered HR services as an independent consultant, Sally brings a breadth of knowledge and outside experience to 4C. A pragmatic problem solver, Sally’s aim is to make people processes efficient and simple while adding strategic value to the business and focusing on what matters to employees.
She then began an extended period of independent contracting, working initially with a number of organisations to build a new operating model for delivery of services in the water industry, supporting the key HR processes to deliver success through people. Sally moved on to work for a managed mental healthcare provider, helping to grow and develop their UK business as a consultant, before being asked to join them as their HRD, developing their UK employment offer and helping them through the sale process to a new US owner. After a period of process improvement and operational HR service delivery at a leading healthcare diagnostics company, Sally moved back into employment to work for a large housing association, driving service excellence in HR operations, systems and data as well as managing reward. After working with a Covid testing company to define and deliver their HR operational delivery, Sally outsourced the service and operationally managed a significant business restructure before joining 4C in 2022, having worked with them on a consultancy basis during the early part of 2020.
Sally works closely alongside the operational management team to ensure the business has the support it needs to live its values, recruit and retain top talent and to grow in a sustainable way. Her team manages all recruitment, onboarding, employee lifecycle and payroll services and supports the Operations team with day to day facilities and IT support.
Nick Harrison
Nick has deep expertise in advanced manufacturing supply chains and factory operations, helping clients to optimise their value chains that delivers sustainable and efficient improvements, that can be layered with digital solutions and operational technology in particular the advancements in battery technology and manufacturing.
Nick leads 4C’s Advanced Manufacturing sector. He has over 25 years of consulting experience in operations, supply chain and manufacturing, specialising in transformation, cash and cost management, process improvement and operational technology in Aerospace, Automotive and Industrial Products.
He has led numerous transformations with global manufacturing organisations operations, from new product introduction, footprint optimisation, cost and value engineering, global sourcing, process automation, pre/post deal integration and industrialisation of operations which delivers clients strategy.
Sustainability, diversity, equity and inclusion
We believe in driving positive change through business and the public sector, and we’re proud to be among the first 1000 UK organisations to achieve B Corp™ certification.
We’re transparent about our impact, held accountable to these standards by independent auditors, and committed to helping create a more sustainable and equitable future. Read our Annual Impact Report.
Delivering value added expertise
The right people deliver the right outcomes. We work collaboratively with our sister companies across the FourCentric group to deploy the best people, equipped with the industry experience and subject- matter knowledge needed to achieve the outcomes our clients are looking for.
About FourCentric
4C is part of FourCentric, a group of six independent specialist companies with a strong presence in the UK, EMEA, and North America. FourCentric operates across every stage of the plan-source-make-deliver supply chain, providing:
- Strategic procurement solutions
- Advanced analytics and data-driven insights
- Operational excellence initiatives
- Senior and executive search and interim management solutions
To find out more about our group’s full capabilities.

