Lucy Woodbridge, Consultant and Coach

Lucy Woodbridge drives commercial growth across the cultural sector as a consultant and qualified business coach, working exclusively with museums, galleries, heritage sites and cultural organisations across the UK. Her consultancy work spans commercial strategy, feasibility studies, business planning, organisational reviews and events and experiences programme development - helping organisations build new income streams, reach new audiences and strengthen what they already have. Alongside this, she offers one-to-one business coaching, supporting people across the sector through change, pressure or transition.

She has spent fifteen years working at a senior level inside some of the UK's most visited cultural institutions. She began her career at the RAF Museum in Hendon, where she built the public events programme from the ground up as a team of one - working across every department to create a programme that drove new audiences and turned a profit. Much of what she built there still runs today, and the model was replicated across other sites. She also led the public programme strand of a National Lottery Heritage Fund bid that secured £4.89m for the RAF centenary.

From the RAF Museum she moved to the Natural History Museum, where she led a team to develop and deliver a programme of profitable public events - including Dinosnores, the Museum's flagship family sleepover event. During her tenure the programme doubled its profits within three years. It was here that she began developing the long-term commercial strategies and business planning approaches that now underpin her consultancy work.

She then joined Imperial War Museums, appointed to a newly created role with a brief to build a commercial department from scratch across five sites. She constructed and led a team of over twenty people - spanning events, experiences, venue hire, filming and catering. Departmental profits grew from £300,000 when she joined to £2m when she left, five years later. During this time she also led the operational and commercial review of IWM's two annual air shows, each attracting up to 50,000 visitors, restructuring how costs were managed across the organisation and improving profitability significantly.

Following IWM, Lucy took a contract role as Head of Events and Experiences at UNICEF UK, leading a team of five through a significant period of organisational change. She subsequently established The Income Curator, through which she now works independently with cultural and heritage organisations across the UK.

Her consultancy clients include UNICEF UK, Hidden London at the London Transport Museum, Immediate Live, and Titanic Belfast, among others, and she sits on the commercial advisory board of the American Museum and Gardens. Each engagement is built around a specific problem - whether that's developing a new revenue stream, attracting a new audience, or improving the commercial performance of an existing programme - and she works alongside internal teams throughout.

Lucy is a qualified business coach, trained at the Møller Institute at Cambridge University. Her coaching clients are typically brought to her by a senior leader - an MD, CEO or director who can see that someone in their organisation needs outside support - or come to her directly, navigating a transition, stepping into a bigger role, or carrying more than they can manage alone. She works with people at all levels across cultural organisations, regardless of role or department.

She is a member of the Museums Association, the Association of Independent Museums, and the Association of Cultural Enterprises.

If you're looking for an experienced consultant and coach to support your strategy, income growth, or team development, book a discovery call to explore whether coaching or consultancy is the right fit for you.