Mat Moakes
London Business School
Age: 40
“Builder and leader at every stage. Passionate about energy transition, developing people, growing great companies.”
Hometown: London, UK
Family Members: Wife, Steph, who works for the UK National Health Service and children Lewis (8) and Casper (5)
Fun fact about yourself: Rollercoaster enthusiast. Favourite so far – Guardians of the Galaxy at EPCOT, Florida
Undergraduate School and Degree: BSc (Hons) Business & Management, University of London (LSE direction)
Where are you currently working? Chief Commercial, Product & Technology Officer at OVO Energy, Chair of OVO Home Services – the UK’s fourth largest energy retailer with 4-million customers
Extracurricular Activities, Community Work and Leadership Roles:
* Author, Green But Not Heard (publishing September 2026) – arguing decarbonisation is a marketing challenge, not a technology one. (see greenbutnotheard.com).
* Winner, Most Viable Venture, LBS Entrepreneurship Summer School 2025.
* Executive Sponsor, Embrace (OVO’s Belonging Network).
* Mentor for the Aleto Foundation programmes with OVO Energy.
Which academic or extracurricular achievement are you most proud of during business school? It was writing my first book. I’d always thought about it, and I was frustrated nobody had addressed what I see as the real challenge of the energy transition: getting people to actually make the change, not just building the technology.
I came to LBS to sharpen my strategy and finance vocabulary. I did. The unexpected output was a book. Two classmates dared me to turn my thesis, that net zero is stuck because we’ve framed it as a technology problem when it’s actually a consumer behaviour and marketing one, into something the industry could read. Thirteen months on, it’s in final edit and publishes in September 2026.
The EMBA made it possible. The breadth of the curriculum, with AI coming into its own at the same time, compressed my learning and sharpened my thinking in real time. Every module fed the book; the book is feeding a set of ventures now following it.
It also pushed me from being an experienced operator to a platform one. Fifty interviews for the book forced me out there, to test the hypothesis and build a network I hadn’t before. Networking was one of the things I came to LBS to develop. The book made me do it.
What achievement are you most proud of in your professional career? It was founding Local Heroes inside British Gas, one of the UK’s oldest utilities and not a natural home for fast-moving ventures. UK home services hadn’t changed since the Yellow Pages: households needing tradespeople, no digital layer or service, very little trust. I built the investment case, but didn’t expect to get the funding. About 8 weeks later, we launched in Croydon in early 2016 with two plumbers, both named Craig. We scaled to 9,000 tradespeople, hundreds of thousands of jobs, tens of millions in GMV, and an NPS in the 80s. It taught me how to think critically, back an idea bravely, and a lot about innovating inside a big corporation: what works, and what absolutely doesn’t.
Who was your favorite MBA professor? I have so many favourites at LBS, but if I had to pick one it would be Adjunct Professor of Marketing David Arnold. By his definition, I was already a career marketer. However, he pushed us to think differently and gave us frameworks I immediately took to work. I used his framework and mindset to sharpen the decarbonisation argument in my book while I was writing it.
One case he taught really stuck with me: Quidel’s marketing of home pregnancy tests in the 1990s US. It changed how my team and I approached our electric vehicles products at OVO. We completely redesigned the proposition based on the real crux of what people really wanted – not actually what they said they wanted. So far, it has been a huge commercial success and I’ve since been back to LBS to share the story as a case study in marketing-led product design.
Why did you choose this school’s executive MBA program? Three reasons. First, it was the cohort: senior operators from sectors I don’t live in, pushing me to think beyond my own experience. Second, it was the faculty: world-class strategy and corporate finance professors who teach to an executive audience rather than at them. Third, it was the geography: London is the centre of European private equity and a hub for climate innovation. The weekend structure and format kept me in the room at OVO through one of the most challenging periods in the company’s history. LBS let me do the rarest thing in a senior career: learn without leaving.
What is the biggest lesson you gained during your MBA and how did you apply it at work? The move from operator to architect. Before the course, I ran P&Ls and built operational teams well, and I’d always been strategically minded, but I didn’t have the end-to-end picture or the confidence to lead the whole agenda of a big business at scale, such as reaching into boardroom discussions about corporate finance or shareholder value. I didn’t fully understand how value is created and captured at the capital layer: how investors read a business, how debt and equity interact, where the real levers are. Previous courses and experience had given me the foundations, but LBS took it to another level and I was using what I learned in real time to navigate some genuinely challenging situations in my second year. After a major leadership change at OVO in November 2025, I added the Chief Product & Technology remit to my Commercial role, a clear turnaround situation. With the grounding I’d built, I could stay calm and lead through it. Pre-EMBA I wouldn’t have had the perspective to do that with confidence.
Give us a story during your time as an executive MBA on how you were able to juggle work, family and education? Early November 2025 was what I’d call ‘peak-stress month’ of the programme. With three modules running and assignments coming out of my ears, three C-level colleagues, including the CEO, left my company on the same day. The business was mid-turnaround and the leadership change was confronting. A week later, while I was preparing for a panel discussion at LBS on decarbonisation, I got a call from my new boss asking me to lead the 600-person Product & Technology team alongside my existing Commercial role. To call it a turnaround doesn’t do it justice. That weekend, I still had kids to get to clubs and football and the cut-and-thrust of normal family life.
I got through it by being ruthless about what I owned versus what I delegated, protecting the non-negotiables with my family as best I could, and treating the EMBA as recovery rather than extra work. The intellectual space was the thing that kept the other two domains standing up.
What I came to admire about the EMBA is that when you have no time, you get very good at sequencing and prioritising. For me, it was a sprint to Christmas and I got there. The programme also teaches you something I now believe deeply: perfect is the enemy of done.
What was your biggest regret in business school? It was the weekends away from the kids, and the workload in between. I’ve had very little decompression time across the two years. Classmates in different circumstances, different roles, or different moments in their careers could throw themselves fully into the clubs, the treks, and the wider experience. I’d have loved to do more of that. But with a demanding C-suite role and a young family, I had to hold boundaries, and that meant pricing myself out of the softer parts of the programme. Every EMBA student has to make that trade and every EMBA tells you it’s worth it, which it is, but all things come at a cost.
What is one way that your business school has integrated AI into your programming? What insights did you gain from using AI? The tools and their capabilities have changed completely since we started in September 2024. I feel genuinely privileged to have been at business school while the world was working out what AI actually is, how to apply it, and what’s possible.
LBS has embedded it across the curriculum, from strategy modules that require you to stress-test frameworks using LLMs, to entrepreneurship courses where AI is a mandatory input to venture design. Early in the programme the school also launched a single environment where you could use every major model safely with LBS credentials. Being able to use the full stack in one place, and play, was a game-changer.
The deeper insight for me came from using AI as an operator rather than a student. I used it the way a senior executive should: pressure-test my own thinking, synthesise material at speed, and do the research my schedule otherwise wouldn’t allow. The lesson is that AI is a force multiplier for people who already know what good looks like, and a trap for people who don’t. The EMBAs who came out of this programme strongest were the ones who used AI to sharpen their judgement, not substitute for it.
The Entrepreneurship Summer School and the venture modules opened my eyes furthest. Instead of using AI to support my workflow, I was using it to test new ventures, build products, run smoke tests, and generate research in days rather than the months and real investment it would have taken before. The push came from the faculty and the curiosity of the cohort, and I’m grateful for it.
What was the main reason you chose an executive MBA program over part-time or online alternatives? The location, the room, and the people in it. You can learn finance on a screen. You can’t learn how senior leaders from pharma, tech, consumer goods and banking argue with each other over a case at 9 pm on a Saturday. I hadn’t experienced the case-study format before and I’ve come to love it as a way of breaking problems down. Online would have given me the content. The EMBA gave me the room, and the room is what accelerated my learning.
I now have a contact book that can solve almost any business problem I face. And there’s a compounding effect you only get from being a full-time executive while you study: whatever you’re covering in class turns up in your day job that same week, and you get to apply it immediately. For me, that loop is where the real value sits.
How did you finance your EMBA and what did you do to make tuition and associated costs more affordable? I’m very lucky that my company, OVO, sponsored me for the programme. My CEO at the time, Raman Bhatia (now CEO of Starling Bank), pushed me to apply in December 2023 as part of a broader stretch into my role, and we structured the support around a commitment to stay through the programme. I’d encourage any senior executive to have that conversation openly with their employer – the EMBA is expensive, but it’s also one of the most direct returns on investment a business can make in a senior leader.
What is your ultimate long-term professional goal? I want to grow great companies that positively impact the world.
I want to solve real consumer problems and create value in novel ways, particularly with what technology and AI are making possible right now. It’s an exciting moment to be an operator. I’ll look for platforms, most likely PE-backed, where there’s a big challenge, a clear value creation thesis, and room for a leader to make a material difference. The energy transition is the obvious arena for me, but the pattern travels across any consumer-facing business where behaviour needs to change and technology needs to be deployed properly.
Alongside that, I’ll keep advising and supporting other operators. The book is the start of that; there’ll be more.
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