Introduction
Fiona McKenzie spent twelve years moving from account director to CEO of River, a B2B marketing agency working with clients including Lenovo, Microsoft and Samsung. When she finally stepped into the CEO role four years ago, she remembers feeling completely ready. Then reality arrived. "It's very easy when you're sitting there, even if you're a part of shaping the decisions," she says. "It is very different to when you are sitting in that true leadership position."
Since then she has led River through a sale to Market Bridge, stepped back from being the final decision-maker into a managing director role for Europe, and publicly spoken up on sexual harassment in the male-dominated technology and marketing sector, a decision that flooded her inbox with private messages from women she had never met. This conversation traces what she actually learned in between.
The gap between being in the room and being the one who decides
Fiona describes her biggest early lesson as CEO as recognising how different it feels to be part of shaping decisions as a leadership team member versus being the person who ultimately carries the weight of them. She went into the role, by her own admission, a little naive, chasing the next step because she could see where she wanted to add value, then having to learn the actual mechanics of the job once she was in it.
A CEO peer network instead of trying to have all the answers
Recognising she had never done the CEO role before, Fiona joined Vistage, a peer network of CEOs from unrelated industries who meet monthly. Her initial scepticism, that people outside her own sector could not possibly understand her specific challenges, gave way to what she now describes as one of her most valuable investments: a group that validated what she was already doing well, challenged her on blind spots, and held her accountable to commitments in a way her own team could not.
Learning to let go of the work she loved most
Fiona is candid that her instinct, coming from a background in client services, was to be extremely hands-on. Stepping back from day-to-day delivery to let the person who succeeded her in that role do things her own way was, in her words, genuinely tricky. Her measure of success as CEO became whether she could take a week's holiday without writing a handover note to anyone, treating her own redundancy from daily operations as the goal rather than a threat.
Speaking up on sexual harassment in a male-dominated industry
One of the hardest decisions Fiona made as a leader was to speak publicly about sexual harassment within the technology channel her agency operates in. She describes weighing the risk carefully, in an industry still heavily male-dominated, before deciding it was the right thing to do and acting quickly once she committed. The public engagement on the resulting post and podcast appearance was modest. What she had not anticipated was the volume of private messages that followed, women sharing their own experiences and thanking her for speaking out, which left her with an unexpected sense of responsibility to continue the conversation even without a clear plan for what that would look like next.
Culture is built in the small interactions, not the big announcements
Fiona's clearest lesson on authenticity is that culture cannot be created through polished all-hands meetings or scripted rollouts. It is built and reinforced through the small, daily interactions a leader has with people, a handwritten note, a recognition post, a genuine response to feedback, and it has to cascade from consistently lived values rather than being declared from the top down.
Selling River, and learning to shift from decision-maker to supporter
When River was acquired by Market Bridge, Fiona describes recognising that what had got the business to that point of growth would not necessarily take it to the next stage, and that the right decision for the company as a whole meant she had to be willing to give up some of the control she had built. Moving from CEO into a managing director role under new leadership required a genuine behavioural shift: respecting decisions made by people above her, even when she might once have made the call herself.
Resilience built through a difficult divorce, not despite it
Asked what her eight-year-old self would be proudest of, Fiona points not to the sale of the business but to leaving a marriage that was not making her happy, while her children were still very young. She went through cognitive behavioural therapy during that period, work she says translated directly into her professional life, and describes the resilience it built as the foundation for the harder decisions she has made in business since.
