Our story
Founded by business partners Gayle Appleby-Merry, Simon Pollard, Chris Stanley and James Stacey, Rue Consultancy was established to focus on supporting the Business and Industry Sector, in its diverse needs around catering and soft FM.
The team brings an immense amount of operational and consultative experience. Gayle having managed, until recently, a large portfolio of global accounts combined with the experience of the wider team having led the consulting industry across multiple sectors, we are equipped with everything that we need to support with up to the minute knowledge from both sides of the industry spectrum.
Meet the team
Gayle Appleby-Merry
Managing Partner
Gayle is a founding partner of Rue Consultancy which was established in 2024 to work exclusively in the Business and Industry and Soft FM services sector.
After spending 30 years cross managing the UK and wider Catering and FM landscape Gayle felt it was time to take all of that knowledge and experience and put it to use developing solutions for clients that rather than operating for them…so took that leap and never looked back…
As a senior female leader, Gayle recently completed the 30% Moving Ahead programme for leading females in senior leadership roles.
With the challenges society faces in the forefront of her mind, she went on to complete a 2-year reverse mentoring programme for diversity and inclusion to promote and embrace differences and challenges faced by her team within ethnic minorities. Her role was to lead change linking employee experiences and requirements with the executive team of the world’s largest contract catering organisation to create long lasting change.
Our clients achieve their goals through her consultative approach and proven track record of establishing the right solution, focusing on achieving each client’s very specific objectives.
Gayles’ experience spans a wide variety of consultancy projects including foodservice strategy creation, competitive tendering and operational reviews. Her specialism is cross company project management, benchmarking and tendering workplace catering services, delivering operational and financial improvements for our top corporate clients.
Gayle has worked in contract catering since starting her career as a fully qualified Chef and then fast tracking into site and area management. Her career has seen time spent across almost all areas of the industry, including Soft FM, Education, Healthcare and B&I.
Simon Pollard
Managing Partner
Simon is a founding Partner of ISCC.
His career started out within the World renowned, French, Relais & Chateau business where he undertook his initial training to become a chef, from a successful time within the group Simon’s career moved out of hotels and into the contract catering arena. Where he enjoyed a continued path upwards and following a number of senior catering and facilities management positions with Sodexo, Simon moved into sales, becoming Sales Director for Sodexo’s prestigious Independent School division.
Having established himself as a major contributor to the industry his services were next, put to good use with a move to Avenance as Sales Director. That move led to continued success where latterly he was promoted to Managing Director for their Education and Healthcare division.
With a wealth of knowledge and experience Simon saw an opportunity to work with clients to really make a difference to the outsourced and in house consultancy market and so left to establish ISCC in 2007. Since setting up initially, ISCC has become the established market leader in the Independent Schools sector. This has given the business the platform it needed to attract further talent to its Senior Team and seen it organically grow a number of supporting arms to the portfolio of businesses.
Simon heads up ISCC’s Catering Consultancy portfolio.