#254 Driving ISO Implementation – Meet the Consultant: Emma Coxhill

The path towards becoming an ISO consultant is often a meandering one. It's not often a career that many aspire to, yet despite that, there are still thousands of ISO professionals worldwide.

We're continuing with our mini-series where we introduce members of our team, to explore how they fell into the world of ISO and discuss the common challenges they face while helping clients achieve ISO certification.

In this episode we introduce Emma Coxhill, an isologist® at Blackmores, to share their recent journey into the world of ISO consultancy and how they've found their first year working with other organisations to help them achieve ISO certification.

You'll learn

· What is Emma's role at Blackmores?

· What does Emma enjoy outside of consultancy?

· What did Emma do before becoming an ISO consultant?

· How has Emma found her first year as an ISO consultant?

· What Standards has Emma worked with so far?

· Has there been any unexpected elements to her role?

· What is the biggest challenge Emma has had during a project so far and how did she overcome it?

· What is Emma's biggest achievement?

Resources

· Isologyhub

· TISAX Webinar

In this episode, we talk about:

[00:30] Episode Summary – We introduce Emma Coxhill, an Isologist® here at Blackmores, to discuss her recent entry into the world of ISO consultancy, including how she's found working on the other side to help other organisations achieve ISO certification.

[03:30] What is Emma's role at Blackmores? Her role primarily involves supporting clients in two key areas: maintaining and continually improving their existing ISO management systems and helping them establish and implement new standards.

Emma specialises in information security management systems (ISMS), but is branching out to other Standards as she takes on more clients.

[04:30] What does Emma do in her free time? Emma is a big fan of the outdoors, enjoying long walks and exploring in general.

It makes sense then that she also enjoys gardening. While it is a lot of work, she finds the result rewarding.

Emma is also a big fan of movies, excluding horror films! She enjoys making the trip to see films on the big screen when she has the chance.

Lastly, Emma is also a qualified life coach. This involves guiding people to get where they want to be in life, with the crucial distinction that it's not about telling people what to do, but rather providing the right questions and tools to help them achieve their goals quicker.

These skills have evidently translated well into her role as an ISO consultant, as auditing is very similar in the fact that it's about giving people a different perspective.

[06:55] What was Emma's previous role? Emma previously worked in admi and retail roles, with her last job being a sales admin at a company for 13 years.

She first started at that company as a sales admin, moved onto business systems and around 2019 the request for them to earn ISO 27001 certification came in.

Back then ISO 27001 was a 'nice to have' and not a 'need to have' like it is today. Emma jumped at the chance to join the team working on the ISO 27001 Implementation, taking part in the research, training and implementation tasks.

The company managed to navigate their certification, even through the turbulence of COVID, and Emma was the one maintaining that ISMS for the following years.

During that time she also implemented TISAX, an Information Security Standard specific to the automotive industry, which you can learn more about on one of our previous webinars hosted by Emma.

Sadly, Emma was made redundant in 2025, but was fortunate to join the Blackmores team shortly after.

[10:10] How has Emma found her first year as an ISO consultant? It's been challenging for Emma to adjust to being on the other side of the fence, helping others to achieve certification rather than being the one to implement a system firsthand.

Thankfully there was plenty of opportunity to learn during her first year with Blackmores, including expanding her repertoire of Standards and being able to learn from other experienced consultants in the team.

She's really enjoying working with a variety of clients, getting to learn about different industries and how different each company is in their operations.

Emma is aware that she's just scratching the surface within her first year, and is eager to learn more.

[12:20] What Standards has Emma worked with so far? ISO 27001 is the main one as it's the one that Emma learned to implement from scratch at her pervious job.

Since joining the Blackmores Team she's also gained experience working with ISO 9001 (Quality Management), ISO 27701 (PII Management), ISO 17100 (Translation), ISO 42001 (AI Management) and TISAX.

ISO 27001 remains her favourite out of all of them, and she's keen to learn more from Blackmores own Information Security guru, Steve Mason.

[14:15] Has there been any unexpected elements to her role? One of the more unexpected aspects has been helping clients navigate various acquisitions. When she joined, Blackmores had an unusual amount of clients currently in the middle of this process.

Dealing with ISO management in these situations can get tricky as you're having to marry up different styles of management as two companies merge. Emma's role was in helping them to navigate that transition.

She was surprised as she expected to be dealing with companies that were business as usual for years, but ISO Management is at the heart of managing these types of changes. So, it was interesting to learn how involved an ISO consultant can get into the inner workings of a business to help ease the burden for all parties involved.

[17:20] What is the biggest challenge Emma has had during a project so far and how did she overcome it? Emma is still relatively fresh to implementation projects, but has found the process to be quite straight forward with the both the Blackmores 7 step methodology and support from other team members.

What has been a challenge was the promotion she was tasked with for TISAX. It was a new service offering for Blackmores due to her expertise, and she was involved in recording a podcast and hosting a webinar. Both activities she'd not had any prior experience with.

She doesn't think of herself as a big presenter, so it seemed like a dauting task. Emma did a lot of practice and went our of her comfort zone to do the webinar, which was positively received by the audience.

The experience certainly boosted her confidence in that area, and though it was a bit stressful at the time due to nerves, she felt like it was a good learning opportunity.

[19:45] What is Emma's biggest achievement? Emma has various moments throughout her life, with an early one being the fact that she passed her driving test first time at the age of 17.

Later in 2005, she went solo travelling for 5 months around Australia, New Zealand and Fiji. She did end up having to work for a bit of that trip to make up some additional funds, but that was a necessary evil. Other than that, she was amazed at all the different people she met during her travels and was so pleased that she was able to complete the trip.

Lastly, she's proud to have joined the Blackmores team in 2025. She's recently helped her first client achieve certification from scratch, which felt like a reward in of itself to know they'd passed their ISO assessment.

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