Meet Our Founder

Juliet Turnbull, founder and CEO

Juliet founded 2to3days in 2014 and has lovingly grown the business ever since. Here's her story.

Setting out

I began my career as a Chartered Surveyor, something I excelled at but, in truth, didn’t really enjoy. It was a male-dominated profession, rife with presenteeism and sexism.

It was tough going, but I learned the importance of staying true to myself and fighting for what’s right. Even though I was promoted to a senior position with good money, I knew there had to be more to life. As is often the case, it was a forced change that made me see the light.

Embracing change

A cancer diagnosis and the surgery that followed meant working from home for a while. I discovered that I could be just as productive working flexibly as full time.

This new found freedom led me to set up my own retail property consultancy.

Running my own business was great and financially rewarding but I still wasn’t passionate about what I was doing. I needed a deeper sense of purpose. One day I went to see a business coach to talk it out and decided there and then that I wanted to become a coach myself. So, I did.

Over the next 10 years I learned a huge amount – not just about business but about human behaviour and what makes us tick. I learned that one of the keys to a successful business is to balance commercial imperatives with people’s emotional needs.

By this time, I was married with two young children and struggling, like so many others, to find the right balance in my own life between work and family. I wanted to have both – to thrive at work and at home – but the pressure kept piling up until eventually I just burned out.

The light bulb moment

What does ‘having both’ really mean? The answer came to me: millions of women want to work flexibly so that they can progress their careers while being actively present in their home lives. They want a combination of professional and personal fulfilment. But the traditional recruitment model wasn’t set up to solve his dilemma.

This was my light bulb moment. I resolved to create the UK’s first female-focused recruitment marketplace, where employers can find and hire the experienced female talent they need, and women can get support and inspiration to apply for those jobs.

I named the business 2to3days because it’s what people say when they want to work flexibly. Yes, it sometimes means literally 2 or 3 days a week. But for the vast majority of us, it means something far deeper than that – it means being able to integrate work with our lives, enabling us to reach our full potential while becoming happier, more productive and more loyal employees – all of which is great news for business.