Co-Founder – STEVE ROCHE
Steve is the UK’s most experienced business plan writer: 27 years, over 450 plans, and more than 75 international entrepreneurs have helped to build ventures in the UK. He has worked across almost every sector, which means he has seen more business challenges — and more Brilliant Ideas — than most people encounter in several lifetimes.
He was an original director of Kooth plc, the pioneering digital mental health service that won the LGC Award for Innovation and the Intellect UK Award for IT Excellence before listing on the London Stock Exchange in 2020. He was there at the beginning — when a genuinely original idea was still being tested — and he helped build it into something that has served hundreds of thousands of people.
He has served twice as President of West London Speakers and as Area Director for Toastmasters International. For seven years, he led one of the largest grassroots football clubs in the UK.
What drives him is the moment when the right question unlocks a room. When someone who arrived believing they weren’t creative leaves with an idea that changes their life. After 30+ years, that moment still surprises him. He believes it always should.
Co-Founder – Cilla Hall
Cilla’s insight — the one that makes Creativity Rooms genuinely different from any other facilitation business — is deceptively simple: where you think shapes what you think.
Most people treat their environment as irrelevant to creative work. They sit at the same desk, under the same light, and wonder why the same thoughts keep occurring. Cilla has spent years studying why this happens and what to do about it. Her expertise in multi-sensory and biophilic design — the use of light, scent, sound, spatial configuration, natural materials, and colour — is grounded in cognitive science and refined through practice.
She designs the five environments that define every Creativity Rooms experience. Each is calibrated to the specific brainwave state and cognitive mode required by that stage. Thinking in one space and then thinking differently in another is not a break. It is part of the method.
As a qualified Life Coach, Cilla also understands the human dimension of creative blocks: the beliefs that limit, the fears that suppress, the conditions under which people feel genuinely safe to think boldly. She brings this understanding to every workshop she facilitates.
MEDICI MIND – Obaid Ullah Azam
The Medici family didn’t paint the Sistine Chapel or design the dome of Florence Cathedral. What they did was bring together the people who could — artists, architects, scientists, philosophers, engineers — and create the conditions for those minds to collide. The breakthroughs happened at the intersections.
Creativity Rooms operates on the same principle. And Obaid Ullah Azam is our Medici Mind.
Obaid has deliberately and restlessly built his career across more fields than most people inhabit in a lifetime. He has founded and run a dental centre. He is the Managing Director of a real estate development company. He has worked as Creative Head for a handicrafts and furniture business, balancing artistic vision with commercial reality. He is a professional actor with credits across Pakistan’s major TV networks (PTV, HUM TV, GEO TV) and a background in theatre. He is an international business consultant specialising in the Pakistan-UK corridor, helping entrepreneurs navigate the cultural, regulatory, and commercial differences between two very different business worlds. He has also run a farm.
His own description of how he works says everything: “I take the world as a playground to learn, unlearn, experiment, search, research, explore, discover, invent, think, rethink, fail, fall and evolve.”
That is not a biography. That is a Medici Effect in human form.
What Obaid brings to a Creativity Rooms workshop is something neither a specialist consultant nor an industry expert can provide: the view from everywhere else. When a business owner is stuck inside their sector’s assumptions, unable to see the solution because they are too close to the problem, Obaid introduces the perspective that breaks the deadlock. The healthcare insight that reframes a retail challenge. The principle from the creative industries that unlocks a manufacturing problem. The cross-cultural lens that reveals what every UK-only perspective has been missing.
This is the Medici Effect made practical. And it is why, in the room where Brilliant Ideas are born, Obaid is always welcome at the table.
Five values shape everything we do
Brave Ideas
The best ideas are always a little frightening at first. We create conditions in which people feel safe enough to think boldly — and challenge enough to think further than they thought they could.
