Charlie Dawson, Founder and Partner

Charlie established The Foundation in 1999 with the aim of helping organisations be more sustainably successful by being customer not financially led. His original inspiration came from working on a new car company launch that did this by happy accident to great effect, breaking records for speed of growth and disrupting an inward-looking market. Recent projects include helping the Morrisons turnaround, finding their voice as foodmakers and shopkeepers with a sense of purpose and belief, helping Be the Business tackle the UK’s productivity crisis by getting small businesses into useful action, helping The National Trust find new sources of sustainable growth complementing their membership offer, and helping John Lewis flesh out a future in Home Services as a customer-centred business.  He has a book about customer-led success, The Customer Copernicus, published in 2021 explaining why something that looks attractive and obvious is rare and, even when achieved, usually temporary. This led to exploration of the shared beliefs people have in organisations about what success is and how it is achieved, and this in turn gets into the whole area of why organisations exist and the current often misunderstood debate around purpose which The Foundation now works on with a number of clients. Charlie previously worked in advertising and has a degree in Manufacturing Engineering, possibly explaining his enthusiasm for cars that look nice but don’t work.