About

Once upon a quack…

Plucky Frank was just a sparkle in the eyes of his human counterpart, Charlie. After years of coaching and experience as the Head of People and Culture for various organisations, Charlie wanted to make great people and culture practices accessible to start-ups as early as possible. 

Culture has a big impact on the likelihood of a start-up getting to scale-up phase, but without proper support, a bunch of things can (and often do) go wrong. Typically, organisations will wait to get to 50-100 people before they hire a full-time internal People & Culture role. There are a few problems with this: 

  • By the time a company is that size, any problematic parts of the company’s culture, structure, and processes get much harder to change. So, Frank is your early-intervention duck that helps you lay the best foundations.

  • Often, at the beginning of a start-up’s life, there is a (well-placed) aversion to anything that feels ‘too corporate.’ This can unintentionally lead to a lack of structure and an absence of processes that, as the company grows, can leave people feeling confused, frustrated, and anxious. Frank’s here to help design and implement processes without the corporate duckery.

  • As a company grows, it can quickly get to a size that’s well beyond any of the founders’ experience. This means that the founders’ personal and professional development needs to match or outpace the company’s rate of growth in order to avoid getting stuck or mired in conflict. Cue: Frank’s inimitable coaching skills. 

Plucky Frank was born to help start-ups develop the people, culture, and systems that will help them thrive as they grow, instead of getting weighed down by a whole lot of cultural, structural, and interpersonal rubbish they could have avoided in the first place. Even better, by building our people & culture capacities from the beginning, we get to influence people’s experience of work. We get to build new norms and expectations around how work integrates with our lives, career paths, and purpose. And to be frank: that’s pluckin’ awesome.

What’s with the name?

Plucky Frank was born (as all good things are) over a few glasses of wine. Charlie wanted a name that reflected her top two values: courage and candidness. Why are these so important? If you can be candid, it builds trust over time and buys you the goodwill you need when you make mistakes. And because being honest can be really hard, courage is crucial to candidness (try saying that ten times fast). But ‘Courage & Candour’ sounded a bit too much like a bad ‘80s rom-com, so Charlie and her wordsmith mate Julia paddled into their brain-thesauruses… and as soon as they landed on ‘plucky’ and ‘frank,’ they knew they’d quacked it. Spurred on by friends and colleagues who unanimously thought Plucky Frank should be a duck (some rogue nostalgia for Plucka Duck, perhaps?), Charlie enlisted designer-friend Hadrian to bring Frank to life, and our brave, big-hearted mascot was born.

Meet the humans

Charlie
Managing Director

Charlie has spent a bunch of time studying what makes people tick.  She holds a Masters of Applied Positive Psychology, a Bachelor of Arts majoring in Politics & Philosophy, a Bachelor of Public Policy and Management, and a Certificate of Executive Coaching from Coaching Australia & Swinburne University.  She also spent a few years having a crack at a PhD before deciding that applying research was more her thing than conducting research. Across her career, Charlie has worked as a policy advisor, has ten years’ experience as a coach and facilitator, and was Head of Staff Flourishing for Bellroy before striking out on her own with an intrepid, straight-talking duck.

Check out her LinkedIn for more details.

Genevieve
Director

Genevieve has spent more than 40 years in Education including 18 years as a Principal in Victorian secondary schools.

Known for her innovation and commitment to improving educational outcomes, Genevieve took on some of the most challenging change programs, including two mergers of multiple schools into a single new entity. She is an expert at facilitating large scale change in challenging environments.

Genevieve now brings her extensive leadership experience and thorough knowledge of effective learning practice to Plucky Frank’s leadership training.

Check out her LinkedIn for more details.

Meet the Franks

Ready to get plucky?