Getting to know Katy Kemble, Key Accounts Director at Adler & Allan

Meet the people behind our success as we unveil the stories, passions, and expertise of our dedicated team. Discover how their experience enables us to become a trusted environmental services partner for clients across the UK.

This time, we're getting to know Katy Kemble, Key Accounts Director at Adler & Allan. During the week Katy leads on driving our sales and working on the strategic vision, and at weekends you’ll find her on top of a mountain bike or climbing the peaks near her home.

What is your role?

As Key Accounts Director, I am responsible for two elements.

Delivering value for our customers by working closely with our customers to understand their challenges and translating these into solutions with our internal teams. I focus on building long-term partnerships that help customers achieve operational resilience, compliance and efficiency, and ensuring our services deliver measurable impact and sustainable outcomes.
Shaping the vision for the future by ensuring our business is positioned to anticipate evolving customer needs and regulatory changes over the next two, five and ten years. I look at market trends and develop strategies that keep us competitive while enabling our clients to navigate complexity and achieve their goals.

What was your background before joining Adler & Allan?

I am a geomorphologist by training, so someone who specialises in the study of sediment and landforms on the Earth's surface. My career focused mostly on river environments, looking at restoration, environmental assessment and sediment movement.

I started as a graduate geomorphologist at Jacobs, and over my 14 years there I worked in various roles.

I led technical geomorphological studies, environmental impact assessments, and river restoration schemes.

I then took a bit of a shift in my career and led a digital transformation initiative for four years. In this role I essentially helped the water, energy and environment division become digitally enabled, implementing new technology and rolling out a transformation programme to embrace new ways of working to deliver projects.

Following this, I held several senior sales roles including framework management. My final role was in Jacobs' power and energy division as their internal sales lead, responsible for all bidding under £2m.

What does a normal day look like for you?

A normal day for me is in three different parts.

Firstly, I help our teams through governance and bids, looking at the technical and commercial delivery around contracts and pricing, as well as quality responses.

Secondly, I work with our teams internally and directly with our clients to understand their needs, changing environments and where we can help work through bespoke solutions to support them.

Thirdly, I work with our team to drive our strategy, as well as looking into our internal delivery to meet our targets.

What challenges do you see in your role or the future?

There’s always challenges around sales in terms of truly understanding client scope and what they want versus what they get and then delivering that effectively. There's always a piece around how we balance the true value we can provide against cost and compliance with regulations.

There are also challenges around how we link people more effectively together both internally and externally, making sure that we operate in a way that allows us to be efficient while still being effective.

There is so much potential for growth and development, so it is key to understand how we keep scaling up and driving forward to build on our success in a way that is going to allow us to make sure we're making the right decisions and putting things in the right place.

More broadly, there's a lot of regulatory change with political and global pressures really starting to influence environmental compliance across the whole industry, so that’s a challenge of how we deliver but also help our clients be compliant as well.

What are you looking forward to in the next 12 months?

I want to continue to expand and drive the business forward and enhance the way we sell our services as end-to-end solutions, so that we can really show the value of our what we do.

I think rolling out the strategy and being able to really pin some success behind that and getting into what we're going to look like in the next two or three years is something we can all get excited about.

What excites you about coming to work?

I just really enjoy my job! I like the challenge, I like problem solving and being around people who challenge and support me. That's what excites me about work, and I think if you have the right people, the challenges are always easy to meet; and if you have interesting challenges, you need the right people to help you solve them.

What do you like to do when you're not working?

I’m a bit of an adrenaline junkie, so I am a mountain biker, a whitewater kayaker, a skier, and a climber.

As a family, we do a lot of walking and hiking out in the lakes, peaks and in Wales. I have two children and love being around my family and friends, spending time with people – which normally involves an outdoor activity.