about.

as entrepreneur.

as operator.

on weekends.

Gillian Davis is a transformational leadership expert. She’s spent the past 5 years at the helm of her leadership advisory businesses OverTime Leader, working with executives in forward-thinking, fast-moving companies like Typeform, Wetransfer and Spotify. She focuses on helping executives define and shape the right company culture that will deliver the strategy.

Since launching OverTime Leader in 2016, Gillian has single-handedly built up the OverTime Leader brand to become a seven-figure leadership development agency, that she has delivered with her amazing team of operators. She designed the ScaleUp Management Program, a high-touch - a high-impact experience designed for the scale-up environment and delivered by previous scale-up operators.

Her focus is to help her clients become more effective as a team, and as individuals, by creating consistency in their leadership. She has helped many teams to navigate through the cultural nuances that might be lost in a remote environment by focusing on communication, empathy, and understanding. 

A sample of projects she has run:

• Running a fully remote leadership program for 30 executives based across Singapore, Austria, and Colorado. 

• Onboarding an acquired team based in SF, and NYC into a Dutch-based scale-up. 

• Bringing a company together to align on their culture whilst sailing on a traditional greek wooden yacht.

• Assisting a global retail business to adapt its delivery and communication style across multiple regions. 

Through grit and perseverance she has grown an international client network spanning the following industries:

Music streaming - Advertising - Venture Capital: Seed, Series A, Series B - Investment Banking - Mobile Marketplace -  Retail - Mobile - Gaming - Social Media - Video Streaming - Fintech -  Cloud Communications - Non-Profit: Community Network - Children’s Charity 

Before starting her consultancy, she was the right hand to Wetransfer CEO, Gordon Willoughby, and founder Nalden, and was responsible for driving core organizational and growth initiatives, such as leading onboarding of acquired companies, manage their international growth to LA and NYC, shape and build a product culture and create a consistent approach for leadership that would drive the organizational strategy. 

Prior to Wetransfer, she was Leadership Director at ustwo London, a leading-edge product development studio in Shoreditch where she responsible for driving self-leadership, autonomy across its manager-less culture and product teams. She supported the opening of their Sydney studio with a focus on team dynamics, new market development, and advising their Managing Director on team growth.

Before her time in London, Gillian spent the foundational years of her career in her family’s Executive recruitment business, most notable for recruiting 3 of Canada’s astronauts based in Montreal, QC. After her father was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, Gillian stepped up to run the business alongside her mother, it was in that time that she found there was a lack of practical leadership books, and ended up creating the solution by co-authoring “First Time Leader: Foundational Tools to Inspire and Enable Your Team” (Wiley 2014).  

In her spare time, she commits to mentoring and advising Black and minority-owned start-ups, mentoring for Barclay’s Techstars, and speaking at events on leadership. She hosts a Leadership podcast, writes a monthly newsletter, and shares her leadership learnings on her insights page.

When not supporting her clients, Gillian splits her time between Montreal and London and you can find her in a wine bar, golf course, or on a hike. She holds a Commerce degree, with a major in Marketing, from Concordia University’s John Molson School of Business.

let’s connect.

gillian@crescentmain.com