The Journey From Burnout to Business Transformation – Exclusive Interview With Gareth Edward Jones

Gareth Edward Jones is a visionary technology leader, environmentalist, and social impact advocate with over two decades of experience at the intersection of people, purpose, and digital transformation. A CIO Times Top 5 Business Leader (2024-25), and Executive Contributor for Brainz Magazine. Gareth is the founder and CEO of Lightrise, where he champions ethical innovation, ESG-driven strategy, and inclusive technology solutions.

Gareth Edward Jones, Visionary Technology Leader, Environmentalist, and Social Impact Advocate

Who Is Gareth Edward Jones?

Gareth Edward Jones, founder of Lightrise™ and chair of the Lightrise Foundation, is a pioneering force in technology-driven business transformation, leadership development, and holistic growth. Guided by a mind-body-spirit philosophy and a deep commitment to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, Gareth empowers individuals and organisations to align purpose with performance and thrive in an era of rapid change.

After witnessing how fragmented systems and short-term thinking limit human potential, Gareth set out to redefine success–creating strategies that build resilience, clarity, and sustainable impact. His approach fuses cutting-edge technology, human-centred design, and leadership principles with empathy and integrity, enabling clients to achieve more consciously and lead with confidence.

Through Lightrise, Gareth partners with ambitious entrepreneurs, progressive institutions, and global organisations to unlock hidden potential and drive meaningful change for people and the planet. His work has helped leaders turn complexity into clarity, adversity into advantage, and challenges into catalysts for growth. With humanity at the core – and the occasional touch of modern-day alchemy – Gareth and his team transform negative challenges into positive value, shaping a future where innovation and purpose go hand in hand.

What inspired you to start Lightrise and focus on People Centred AI, HR, ESG & Cyber-Security modern work solutions and services?

I’ve always been driven to support people and make a positive difference, but shortly after the pandemic, I burned myself out (which I wrote about). I had been successfully working remotely on international digital transformation and HR projects for several years. I had worked at some of the world's top universities, charities, and the world's oldest municipal police force in London. I was successful in all my roles, but I was never satisfied. I still held a deep connection to nature and, since childhood, a desire to help change the world. As I got older, that inner voice grew louder and was reinforced by witches, psychics, and spiritualists I had met on my journey, foretelling a 'golden future' and my path to help others. I reflected deeply on my life and realised I could turn my learning and experience into something with a broader, more positive impact. I studied Environmental Science as an Undergraduate and subsequently Development Management as a Postgraduate. I never lost sight of the challenges Humanity and the Planet collectively face, yet somehow found my career shaping around HR and IT. When you want to provide strong solutions in this area, you really need to focus on all the important foundations, which are HR, ESG, Modern Work, and Cybersecurity. Equally, I maintained my connection to nature through approaches to wellbeing, and charity challenges, including a trek to Everest and an Arctic Survival Challenge in Sweden. When I was a kid, I always had an entrepreneurial streak, and this has never left me. I started my own car-washing business at the age of 10, then, soon after, sold fishing lures to my Dad’s fishing friends. Fishing was a skill my father passed down to me, and it became a great approach for mindfulness too.

I love the autonomous, creative, and opportunistic approach of entrepreneurship. But after burning out, I saw a way to transmute my lived experience (including those shadow moments) into the light of positive impact, weaving together my mind-body-spirit philosophy with technology. Throughout my career, I realised that without controlling all organisational levers, influencing and building a company culture focused on positive values, strong ethics, and integrity was challenging. Positive change at a corporate level is rigid and slow, and I can be impatient. For speed, I decided to go it alone and build from the ground up, using my skills across all business functions. Through Lightrise, we demonstrate how simple it is to build a remote business for good by aligning ourselves with the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals. The goals are an internationally agreed, ready-made blueprint for our combined success. Even without the UN label, these 17 intentions make good practical sense. With this approach, I was able to quickly establish Lightrise’s values, strategy, mission, and pace. Our mission would be simple. To make a positive impact in the world by providing IT and HR services with humanity and integrity. In doing so, we could show the world a templated approach to being a business for good, whether you were the size of a bee or a giant enterprise.

As time has moved forward, I’ve taken this model to impact individuals too, by providing coaching, speaking, and wellbeing services based on my own journey through anxiety, fear, and resilience. Advising on the tools, techniques, and technology I used to help me.

How does Lightrise help businesses transform their operations using Cloud and AI technologies?

We don't believe in unnecessary spending and dislike inefficiency. We show people and organisations how they can achieve more value with less investment, using appropriate technologies and approaches, and always advocating for maximising the value from commercial off-the-shelf solutions to reduce complexity. Now four years old, we have built a company where AI and People bring equal value and complement each other. Copilot is part of the fabric of our organisation (even though we started with ChatGPT). Now we’re able to help others realise how it can be used across all functions in their business, as we have done in ours, and, more importantly, weave this together from a change perspective to take people on a successful journey.

How does Lightrise help individuals grow?

Everyone’s path is different, and we recognise that. At a collective level, we’ve started a community to enable and support those with entrepreneurial mindsets who want to cut their own path, providing a safe place to explore and learn from our experience of building a fully remote, cloud-based organisation. We’ve also tried to bring some positive disruption to coaching. Coaching has been beneficial for self-realisation and individual growth in my own life, but unfortunately, it remains largely the preserve of those who can afford it. When we were getting dozens of requests a day for coaching services from people in developing countries, we put together a pay-what-you-want coaching session. This provides an entry point to coaching that is also enhanced with AI.

How does your approach make you different from other consulting firms offering similar services?

Our focus is on People and Planet above profit. It's the positive impact we make that drives us daily. Of course, making more means we can do more to help others. We weave our values of Humanity, Integrity, Humility, and Respect into everything we do, ensuring continual positive impact in our relationships. This often starts by introducing our clients to our work on international development projects worldwide that align with the UN Goals. Every engagement with us creates an impact, whether that's restoring rainforest, empowering women in developing countries, or feeding people experiencing poverty. All of this is traceable on our website. We are also keen to show people how a cloud approach can be used as part of a strategy for simplifying ESG. The data centres we use have stretching targets to be carbon negative and water positive by 2030, and you can monitor all the cloud solutions we provide with free Emissions Impact Reports, making it easy to reduce reporting complexity and increase transparency.

Our roots were in HR and People, so when we approach IT projects, we do so in a human-centred way. What's the change needed? How will it be received? We make sure people aren't 100% utilised so they won't burn out. How can AI empower people to achieve results and value more quickly? On Lightrise Projects, we develop an understanding of how to meet your needs exactly, to plot a path to success.

Can you describe a typical problem your clients face, and how you help them solve it?

We found that when talking about People Processes and Technology, it links to HR, Learning, Cyber Security, and Modern Work. To create the most complete solution, that's what we advise and provide managed services for. But traditional challenges include improving all experiences and processes in a worker lifecycle from recruitment, time capture, leave and absence, joining/leaving, case management, compensation, pay, engagement experience, and information security. Equally, we assist with the exact solutions that have enabled our own success, including CRM, Finance, and Project Operations.

At an individual level, people approach us seeking assistance with personal resilience, leadership, entrepreneurship, and being their best selves. We’ll keep evolving our assistance offering based on our own learning journeys. For example, as part of my personal interests and development, I’m currently learning hypnosis and other forms of healing modalities.

Whether organisational or individual, we approach everything with empathy and understanding in a structured, risk-conscious way, aiming to make as much positive impact together as we can.

What kind of results have your clients achieved after working with you?

Solutions that they feel empowered to own and enhance themselves with Lightrise as their safety net. Reduced technical debt and lower total cost of ownership through our approaches to provide appropriate solutions and not upsell unnecessary add-ons.

A great example of this is one of our current clients, who recently had to upgrade after their vendor “sunsetted” one of their solutions. We took the opportunity in their cloud upgrade to simplify their architecture and process. The best solutions should be architected to be quick and straightforward to realise value.

How do you tailor your solutions depending on the size or industry of a business?

Understanding what success looks like is key. Collectively, we've learnt a lot from large enterprise projects, which we've distilled into approaches appropriate for Small to Medium Businesses to get value rapidly, in templated or tailored ways. We use best-practice approaches and Copilot to speed up delivery while guiding our clients to do the same. In a world where McKinsey determines 70% of IT projects fail. We always work with clients to target being in the successful 30%.

What is your monthly managed service, and why is “1 to 10 days per month” an ideal setup for your clients?

There has never been a better time to run a small business. Capitalism is built on controlling labour and means of production, traditionally making the costs inhibitive for many to succeed. With AI, we've all got a chance to get onto those first rungs on the business ladder. But while all that is true, global change, economic headwinds, and cybersecurity complexity all pose challenges for businesses. We've always said it's important to treat our clients as we want to be treated as clients ourselves. The reality is, we never found a partner who could help us across all the fronts we needed without being upsold or overcharged for services our bootstrapped approach could afford, so we've done it all ourselves. Now we are training others to do it through the Lightrise Community on Skool, which we run with our sister impact organisation, the Lightrise Foundation. We want to see the community of learners there succeed in their entrepreneurial endeavours and become part of our talent pool. Providing our clients with 1 to 10 days a month gives them a scalable, low-risk approach to cover all the key foundations they need to start a business, but were unable to find in any single supplier.

What should a business expect during the first consultation or assessment with Lightrise?

A free impact token to make a positive impact towards our mission; after that, we'll be keen to listen and understand how we can meet their needs exactly. Something often overlooked in many projects is what success looks like. Once we know this and the landscape, we'll be keen to show them standard solutions that they can get the best value from, and point them to any free trials available, with time to follow up on their thoughts in the future.

How does your team handle sensitive areas such as cybersecurity or HR compliance while ensuring smooth operations?

I think the important thing is to make sure everything is managed with zero trust and that we treat our clients' data and security with the same diligence we treat our own data and processes. Treat clients as you want to be treated yourself.

We now use AI-enabled security, which simplifies management. We also have a strong relationship with the University of Southampton, which is ranked as an academic centre of excellence in Cyber Security Research by the UK Government, and ranks in the top 100 globally for research performance and educational reputation. Tim Berners-Lee is even one of its alumni!

A number of the team come from an HR background and still have a confidential, People-first approach to managing the business and compliance, which is further supported by a comprehensive set of skills and competencies available to us via our sub-contractor network, the Lightrise Alliance. All suppliers in this network have had to meet the high bar we've set for ethics, data compliance, integrity, and environmental credentials.

What common misconceptions do potential clients have about consulting, and how do you address them?

[Laughs] I've never had much time for consultants in my career. I thought they cost too much, were ineffective, and inefficient at producing results. This can be a misconception, or it can be a reality depending on which consulting partners you work with.

Other common misconceptions include:

• Consultants just give advice

• Consulting is only for big companies

• Consulting is all about strategy

• Consultants replace employees

We’ve worked with a lot of large companies and bloated projects; however, in reality, targeted consultancy with practical outcomes and measures of success can add a lot of value for small to medium businesses, as well as Enterprises. We provide professional services that empower people and companies. Something that I’ve regularly heard throughout my career helping people with Functional Consultancy or Solution Architecture is this “Oh our current/previous partner wouldn’t let us change the system. Every configuration change had to go via them”. How can companies own their solution, or their employees feel empowered when this approach is taken? Our goal no matter the size of the organisation is to leave in place a solution with local knowledge on how it can be maintained operated by the organisation itself. Our intent is not to replace employees with expensive outsourced support, but to provide support in the context of making our clients feel safe that they have someone supportive to lean on when needed. We do provide advice, but equally we create tangible results, whether this is in the form of project management, HR consulting, or solution analysis, setup, and quality assurance. Each client’s needs are different, and strong consultants can operate at all levels of a business.

We are very task-oriented, always ensuring there is value from the exchange of our time. Our plans are structured with success targeted as the outcome. Each task provides value and progress towards helping a client achieve that success as quickly and responsibly as possible.

What advice would you give to a business owner who is hesitant to invest in consulting services but wants to grow sustainably?

Consulting services are being disrupted. Use AI as much as you can within your risk appetite and recognise when to engage specialist consulting to balance genuine legal risks and targeted value. Understand when you are engaging with consultancy: what problem it solves for your business/organisation/institution, how quickly it will create value, and how it empowers others in your broader internal team. There is still a place for consultancy, but make sure you choose partners who align with your vision, goals, ethics, and shared appetite for success; doing anything less could be a costly decision.

What’s next?

Gareth is working on his first autobiographical leadership book, layered with entrepreneurial, personal, and spiritual stories and lessons. Buyers of the first editions of the book, Darkfall to Lightrise, will also receive one share in the Lightrise business, meaning they can enjoy the story so far, while also being part of our next chapter.

Darkfall to Lightrise is expected to be out in Spring/Summer 2026.

Start your journey with Lightrise today.

If you would like to own a signed copy of Gareth’s book and a share in Lightrise’s future, please register interest using the link on Linktree.

We welcome you to join the Lightrise community and to chat about how we can support your transformation.

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