Meet Louis Chambers | Head of Australia at ghSMART

As Partner and Head of Australia serving clients across APAC, Louis Chambers advises CEOs, boards, founders, and investors on their most important leadership decisions. Based in Australia, Louis juggles surfing and parenting three small children alongside scaling ghSMART APAC.

Built to Advise: Realizing the Work was Always About the Who

Louis spent years thinking he was building a career in strategy consulting. It took a farewell lunch, a Friday afternoon conversation, and eventually breakfast with an old colleague to help him see what he'd actually been doing the whole time.

Starting in Strategy

Louis joined McKinsey as a generalist consultant, working across industries and functions on the kinds of complex strategic and operational problems that draw ambitious people into consulting in the first place. He enjoyed the intellectual pace, the variety, and the calibre of the people around him.

But something kept happening that he didn't quite have a name for yet.

One of his most meaningful engagements was serving a hospital client struggling with its performance on patient outcomes and financial sustainability. Louis had worked closely with the hospital’s leaders to lift surgical productivity, and his relationships went beyond the project's scope. At the end, the nursing team organised a farewell lunch to thank him for the impact he'd made across the organisation.

At the time, he took it as a rewarding side effect of strategy consulting done well. Looking back, it was a clue.

The Friday Afternoon Call

A pattern began to emerge. The conversations Louis found most energising weren't always the strategy discussions.

One Friday afternoon, a client – the CFO of a £6bn line of business – asked Louis to stop by the office. When he arrived, the executive shared that he'd just been promoted to CEO of that division. He was delighted but nervous, and wanted Louis's perspective on the team he was about to inherit. It had nothing to do with the immediate project. It was a leadership conversation, pure, and simple.

"I wasn't there because of the analysis," Louis recalls. "I was there because he trusted my judgement."

Moments like that started to accumulate. And with them, a growing realisation.

"I was forming these relationships, winning trust and being invited to opine on leadership topics, but I didn't know there was an entire profession built around that," he says.

The work he found most meaningful had been hiding in plain sight throughout his strategy consulting career. Once he saw it, it was hard to unsee.

Finding the Right Home

Louis wasn't looking to leave consulting behind. He still loved solving complex problems and working alongside talented people. What he was looking for was a way to spend more time doing the part of the work he actually enjoyed most. When a former colleague invited him to breakfast and told him about ghSMART, it clicked immediately.

"I'd never heard of ghSMART," he says. "But this was someone I'd always respected. When she told me about this place, I was all in."

It was the first time he'd seen a firm where leadership wasn't one consideration among many — it was the whole engagement. The conversations became the project. He joined in March 2020, just as COVID. arrived, with a young family and a move to Australia taking shape.

A Different Way of Working

The adjustment took time. At McKinsey, the structure and hierarchy were constant. At ghSMART, neither exists in quite the same way. Clear expectations on outcomes and a relentless focus on the highest standards of client service, but real latitude in how you work.

What helped Louis find his feet was being paired with a senior mentor, partner Maria Blair, from his earliest weeks at the firm. It was a level of investment in his development that he hadn't experienced before.

"It was the best free coaching I'd ever had," he says.

He also noticed something subtler: people here had time for each other. Colleagues reliably showed up for each other with curiosity and generosity. It sounds simple, but it wasn't the norm he'd come from.

With their UK daycare closed due to COVID and Louis’ wife returning to work full time after their son was born, Louis dialed back the volume of client work for several months and flexed where, when and how he worked to juggle their evolving childcare set-up. No formal arrangement, no penalty. Just the flexibility and open conversations to figure it out.

"You can have a quiet month and a busy month next," he says. "I could choose how to optimise it, versus it being imposed on me."

Building Something in Australia

As COVID faded, Louis found himself travelling regularly to Asia for client work. One trip became four and before long he was living in Australia full time. Having been part of the scale-up years for ghSMART's Europe office, he had a sense of what building a new geography could look like. The idea of an Australian office moved from background thought to real conversation, and eventually to reality.

Today he leads the team advising leaders across the region during some of the most consequential moments in their careers and organisations.

When he reflects on how he got here, he can see the thread running through all of it. Not a particular industry or role, but a consistent pull toward the same kinds of conversations. The nursing team at the hospital. The newly promoted executive on a Friday afternoon. Those clients weren't looking for more analysis on “what” problems, but for judgement and partnership on the “who”.

Louis is in Sydney now, surfing when the schedule allows, leading a team he built, and advising leaders across a region he chose. It's not the career he mapped out at McKinsey. It's better.

‍Learn more about Louis here.