Wellington Place is more than just bricks and mortar; it’s a thriving community powered by people. Our People of Wellington Place series aims to spotlight our community, share their inspirational stories and find out why Wellington Place is much more than a place to work.
Interview with Alexandra Fogal, Partner at EY, based at 12 Wellington Place.
Alex is one of the best known faces in the Yorkshire business community, having supported entrepreneurs and business owners for more than 20 years. As a partner at EY, Alex leads the firm’s Private business practice across the North of England and runs the UK EY Entrepreneur Of The Year™ programme across five regions.
Outside of EY, Alex is proud to chair Business Beats Cancer Yorkshire, bringing the business community together to make a real difference in the fight against cancer.
Can you tell us a bit about your background and current role?
My passion is supporting entrepreneurs and business owners, whether starting out, scaling up, or already established, to achieve their ambitions.
With many years in banking before joining EY, I understand both the opportunities and challenges businesses face. Today, I focus on building strong, long-term relationships across the region and connecting clients with the right expertise from across EY to help them grow.
I am the central point of contact for businesses, building collaborative relationships with senior leaders and supporting them. My role is to understand everything about that business, and then we help them to grow and scale. Working closely with so many businesses is fascinating as they’re all unique.
At EY, we have deep expertise across a wide range of service lines, so there’s not much that we can’t help a business with, which is just fascinating. I think the point of difference is the relationship-led model that we have, keeping our clients at the core of that is key. We understand the entirety of that business and go on the journey with them. I absolutely love what we do.
What do the most successful entrepreneurs have in common and why is it important to celebrate and support them?
To co-lead our UK Entrepreneur of the Year™ programme and be part of what is a global entrepreneur community, is a huge privilege. I’m probably biased given my role, but I do think entrepreneurs are the backbone of the UK economy. They’re really driving growth up and down the UK, and that’s something that we should be really positive about, particularly given today’s challenging economic environment.
Entrepreneurs are tenacious and resilient. They are willing to take risks and will always find a way through things and around things to grow businesses. Our programme’s class of 2026, which is made up of almost 100 entrepreneurs, is contributing £3.6bn to the UK economy and employing more than 22,000 people this year. That is huge, and that’s just one cohort.
What makes the North such an exciting place to do business?
I think the North region is particularly exciting. From an EY perspective, we’ve got almost 500 people based out of the Leeds office here at Wellington Place, and more than 2,000 people across the North. We are investing in our regional market.
That investment is enabled because we have many of the UK’s best businesses across all sectors located here. We’ve got a thriving tech community, financial services, business services, manufacturing and industrial, as well as consumer. The regional markets are definitely growing and it’s a great place to do business.
What advice would you give someone looking to grow their business or career?
The most important advice I would give anybody looking to grow their career would be to really build a strong community around you. From an early stage in my career, I built my networks and communities. That’s always kind of been something that’s in me, really. And I would encourage just anyone to do that because that is the business world. You never know when you need someone to help you.
And for me it’s all about relationships. It’s who you know, who can help you, who you can support and how well you can collaborate. I also think one of the beauties of working in the Yorkshire business community is that, in my experience, people do genuinely want to help each other.
Tell us about your role with Business Beats Cancer Yorkshire and why you’re passionate about it?
Business Beats Cancer Yorkshire brings together the business community across Yorkshire to raise vital funds for life-saving research on behalf of Cancer Research UK.
The biggest pull factor for me in getting involved was that everyone’s touched by cancer. Personally, I’d lost my grandfather, and I’ve since lost my mum to cancer. So, I was thinking, if I could bring the business community together for good, why wouldn’t I want to do that and raise vital funds? So that’s what we’ve done.
This is our fifth year and when we started, I set a little challenge to see whether we could get to over half a million pounds of fundraising. We smashed that at our gala dinner in March, which was just incredible. We’re now at £540,000 with all that going towards funding life-saving research right here in the region. The business community is right behind us as well which is just incredible.
I am grateful to be supported by a brilliant voluntary board who freely give their valuable time to support me and they have been crucial in building our fundraising momentum and exciting calendar of events.
Our next event is Yorkshire Takes to the Stage at Howard Assembly Room on September 10. We’ve got ten fantastic acts from the business community showcasing their talents – from singing to comedy, all in aid of Stand Up to Cancer, swapping the board room for the stage. It’s also going to a great networking opportunity so get in touch for tickets!
What is your favourite thing about working at Wellington Place and why?
I just love the environment that we get to work in being based at Wellington Place. It has the feel of London as an office environment. The outside space is fantastic with lots of options for food and drinks and I often bump into people I know which is brilliant. It’s a really nice place to work; it just makes you feel good.
Thank you to Alex for taking part in People of Wellington Place! If you’d like to take part in the series, please email info@wellingtonplace.co.uk
