Experienced leadership for organisations building for the future

Cedarwoods provides experienced executive leadership, consultancy and advisory support to organisations facing change, transformation, growth or challenge.

Interim Leadership • Consultancy • Transformation • Strategic Advisory

Experience when you need it

Organisations do not always need another permanent senior appointment.

Sometimes they need experienced leadership for a particular period, a fresh perspective on a challenge, or additional capacity to deliver an important project.

Cedarwoods provides senior-level expertise to help organisations understand the challenge, determine what needs to change and turn strategy into practical delivery.

Founded and led by Dr Christopher Derby, Chartered FCIPD, Cedarwoods draws on more than 20 years of senior and executive leadership experience across housing, education, charity and the arts.

More than People & HR

Christopher’s career has combined senior executive leadership with practical, hands-on experience across People, Communications, IT, digital development, stakeholder engagement and organisational events.

At Trident, he held executive accountability for the Marketing & Communications function, leading through a Head of Communications, managers and support staff and overseeing internal and external organisational communications.

His practical communications experience included working with Matrix partners on major events surrounding the National Housing Conference in Harrogate and Manchester, coordinating marketing, invitations, stand design, event partners, catering and speakers, as well as hosting and delivering events on the day.

He organised Trident Group’s 2023 and 2024 staff conferences at Millennium Point, Birmingham, delivering both as hybrid events involving colleagues attending in person and online, external stakeholders, exhibitors, awards and guest hosts. He has also organised numerous staff engagement events throughout his career.

His digital experience included the 2022/23 resident portal, where he led the marketing and engagement activity, established resident user-testing groups and worked with external web-development partners on design and implementation. He also brought together IT, Communications and external partners on wider website development and user acceptance testing.

Earlier, through Cedarwoods, Christopher delivered complete marketing, advertising and launch activity for hospitality and entertainment businesses in Birmingham, including launch events.

This combination of strategic leadership and practical delivery remains central to Cedarwoods: understanding what needs to happen, bringing the right people together and delivering it effectively, on time and within budget.

Successful transformation requires People, Leadership, Communication and Technology to work together.

An idea with roots

The Cedarwoods concept was created by Christopher Derby in 2001 around the idea of “Building your business for the future.”

In its early years, Cedarwoods was used for consultancy and project work, including the complete marketing, advertising and launch of hospitality and entertainment businesses in Birmingham.

The Cedarwoods name and cedarwoods.co.uk domain were retained while Christopher pursued a long senior and executive career, accumulating extensive experience across People, transformation, communications, technology, governance and organisational leadership.

More than two decades later, Cedarwoods is being developed again as the vehicle through which that accumulated experience can be offered to organisations through selective interim leadership, consultancy, transformation projects and executive advisory work.

The original principle remains the same:

help organisations build the capability they need for the future.