Ben Legg

Ben Legg brings a rare breadth of experience to the conversation about independent professional practice. His career began with a decade in the British Army's Royal Engineers, where he trained at Sandhurst, completed a civil engineering degree, and served in operations including the relief of the Siege of Sarajevo in 1995. He then spent a decade in corporate strategy and marketing, moving from McKinsey to Coca-Cola, where he held sales and marketing roles in Greece, Poland, and India before leading the Coca-Cola India turnaround.

His third career decade focused on technology. He was headhunted by Google and rose to COO of Europe (2007–2009), where he tripled revenue by engineering the blueprint for how Google monetises audiences. He then served as Group CEO of Adknowledge, a PE-backed ad tech company, growing revenue from $120 million to $350 million and preparing the company for an IPO before market conditions led to a strategic pivot.

In 2019, Ben made the deliberate decision to leave corporate employment and build a portfolio career combining advisory board roles (MoneyPlus, Hypervolt, GALLOS Technologies), mentoring senior executives, consulting with Wall Street investors on technology trends through Digital People International, and keynote speaking at international conferences on AI, the future of work, and human-AI collaboration.

When friends began asking for help making the same transition during lockdown, Ben first ran the Portfolio Crew Workshop, which grew rapidly.

He then co-founded The Portfolio Collective with Fiona Chorlton-Voong, and the community now comprises over 16,000 portfolio professionals worldwide, offering networking, training, peer support, and the Catapult course for launching a portfolio career.

Ben is the author of Marketing for CEOs: Death or Glory in the Digital Age.

He lives in London with his family, including a five-year-old and a six-year-old, splitting time with New York. He has five children in total, the oldest being 31.