The person behind the fairy.
Joanne King is a qualified and experienced behaviour change, relationship and social impact specialist across several sectors, including homelessness, criminal justice, substance mis-use, poverty alleviation, domestic abuse, long term unemployment, mental health and social care.
My name is Joanne King. I am the Business Fairy. I started in Liverpool as the Liverpool Business Fairy but am now expanding my services to other areas, very exciting times ahead!
I am a qualified and experienced behaviour change and relationship specialist, thought leader and social entrepreneur. Across 25 years I have walked alongside people through some of life's hardest moments, and I have helped thousands of individuals, hundreds of businesses and charities to move past fear and into confident action. No woo, no corporate bullshit, just honest, practical support that works.
I believe healthy relationships are everything. The relationship you have with yourself shapes how you communicate, make decisions, lead others, build trust and handle difficult moments. Businesses are built by people, so healthier relationships create stronger leaders, better teams, more honest partnerships and organisations that can grow without losing what matters.
During my 25 year career, I successfully designed, mobilised and managed complex, multi-sectoral and multi-disciplinary partnerships across several areas in the North West and within some of the most challenging sectors, including domestic abuse, substance misuse, mental health and crime. I brought different organisations and professionals together around shared outcomes, and managed whole family services focused on empowering people to overcome deeply complex problems, including long term unemployment and poverty.
Through this work I became interested in socio- economics and developed a passion for ensuring that the maximum amount of money per pound reached the families and communities we existed to serve, as well as making sure those families had maximum input to the decisions that were made for them, rather than about them.
Each project I have managed has involved supporting the delivery partner organisations to build their capacity and empower their staff with new skills. I have led complex workforce development training projects across multiple local authority areas, including Cheshire East, Cheshire West and Chester, Halton, Warrington, Stockport, Bradford in several other local authority areas across the UK. I have also managed partnerships with global providers in the UK. Throughout this work I managed high value projects and increased social return on investment across all of the areas I worked in.
Besides my work based training and qualifications in Behaviour Change, Mental Health, Addictions, Domestic Abuse, Parenting, Teaching and emotional wellbeing- I also have a business degree from Edge Hill University, Liverpool and a postgraduate certificate in Business from Liverpool John Moores University.
The Business Fairy came about because I had supported so many organisations in my employed capacity that I decided to set up my own consultancy, using the skills I had learned in those roles along with my two business qualifications.
I started out helping friends untangle their business ideas around a kitchen table. Over the years I have supported thousands of individuals and hundreds of founders, family businesses, charities and social enterprises across the North West and beyond. The pattern is always the same: the thing holding people back is rarely the spreadsheet.
It is fear. Fear of being judged, of getting it wrong, of asking for money, of being seen. So that is where we start. We take the fear out of the room, and then the practical work becomes surprisingly straightforward.
Alongside The Business Fairy I am the founder of Believe Again CIC, where I created The Self-Esteem Approach™ and the Age, Stage and Phase™ Model. That same thinking runs through my consultancy work, because businesses are built by people, and people work best when they believe in themselves.
ASP wasn't something I sat down and decided to invent. It came from practice.
In 2022, while working in domestic abuse, I was preparing to speak at a conference about six prevention and early-intervention projects I was managing. I had ten minutes. There was absolutely no way I could meaningfully explain six separate projects in that time, so I started looking at what connected them.
And that's when I saw it: Age. Stage. Phase.
Who are we trying to reach, and at what age can we intervene or prevent harm? What stage of change are they at? And what phase of their circumstances are they in when intervention is most likely to make a difference?
What began as a simple way of explaining complex work became a framework for thinking about when, where and how we intervene.
The original ASP model was developed by me while working at MyCWA and was specific to domestic abuse. I have since developed and expanded the concept through Believe Again CIC so that its principles can be applied much more widely across early intervention, prevention and behaviour change.
Sometimes innovation isn't about creating something more complicated. It's about suddenly seeing the pattern that was already there.
If you feel the need to test someone, it's better to communicate clearly instead, because energy doesn't lie, and testing a person without telling them really erodes trust.
Honest, never harsh
You will hear the truth, delivered kindly. No shame, no lectures, no pretending.
Practical over polished
Small doable steps beat a beautiful strategy that sits in a drawer.
Confidential always
What you share stays between us. Nothing leaves the room.