From Cabin Crew to Crisis Response: How Vicki Fuller Helped Build a Global Emergency Consultancy
Featuring: SpillConsult and Victoria Fuller LinkedIn Profile
When Vicki Fuller talks about her career, she laughs at how varied it has been. From aspiring cabin crew to banking, IT sales, engineering administration, and eventually becoming Operations Director at SpillConsult, her journey has been anything but linear.
But listening to her story, a pattern quickly emerges. At every stage, Vicki has been driven by curiosity, relationships, and an instinct to step forward when something needed doing.
“I’ve never asked for a promotion,” she reflects. “Everything has come from just getting stuck in and trying to make things better.”
That mindset has helped shape SpillConsult into one of the leading providers of incident management and emergency response consultancy outside the United States — supporting global energy companies and organisations facing some of the world’s most complex operational risks.
Learning Through Experience
Growing up in Hedge End near Southampton, Vicki never saw university as the right path for her. She studied leisure and tourism at college, fuelled by a teenage dream of becoming cabin crew.
“I just wanted to get out into the world, earn money, and be independent,” she says.
A work placement with American Express unexpectedly opened her first professional door. After impressing during her placement, she was offered a role in business travel before she had even finished college.
That early experience taught her something that would define her career: relationships matter.
After the company was acquired, Vicki pursued her original ambition and joined British Airways cabin crew at Gatwick. While she loved the customer interaction and travel, the reality eventually fell short of the glamour she had imagined.
“One hotel room started to look much like another,” she recalls. “I realised I loved working with people more than the travel itself.”
That self-awareness would become a recurring theme throughout her career.
Knowing When Something Doesn’t Feel Right
After leaving British Airways, Vicki moved into customer service at a national bank during the early 2000s. But despite being successful in the role, she became increasingly uncomfortable with the aggressive sales culture developing inside retail banking at the time.
Staff were encouraged to push credit cards, loans, and insurance products onto customers who often could not comfortably afford them.
“I just knew it didn’t sit right with me,” she says. “I’d been brought up to avoid debt, and suddenly I was being asked to encourage people into it.”
At just 22 years old, Vicki made the difficult decision to leave — prioritising her values over job security.
It was a defining moment.
Many professionals stay in environments that conflict with their principles because leaving feels risky. Vicki instead trusted her instincts and moved forward.
Building Confidence Across Industries
What followed was a career defined by adaptability.
Vicki joined IBM, initially supporting government sales teams before progressing into product management and later channel sales during Lenovo’s acquisition of the business.
The move exposed her to large-scale corporate operations, technology distribution, and relationship-driven sales.
“I’m not a hard sales person,” she explains. “I build relationships first, and the sales come from trust.”
That ability to connect people, solve problems, and understand the wider picture became her greatest professional strength.
Rather than focusing narrowly on individual tasks, Vicki always wanted to understand why things mattered.
“If I understand the purpose behind something, I can usually make it better.”
Choosing Family — Without Losing Ambition
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After marrying and starting a family, Vicki made another significant career decision.
When returning from maternity leave, she was told her senior sales role could only continue full-time. The alternative was stepping away.
For Vicki and her husband, the decision became less about career status and more about the kind of family life they wanted to build.
“It didn’t feel right for us to put our daughter into full-time childcare just so most of my salary could go on nursery fees,” she says.
She stepped away from corporate life and worked part-time while raising her daughters — carefully balancing family priorities with financial realities.
But even during those years, her drive to contribute never disappeared.
“I need to keep my brain busy,” she says. “I like solving problems and feeling useful.”
A Chance Conversation That Changed Everything
Like many SME journeys, the next chapter began not through a formal recruitment process, but through conversation and trust.
While attending a friend’s birthday celebration, Vicki met one of the founders of SpillConsult. Over casual conversation, she spoke about her background and admitted she was feeling under-stimulated in her current administrative role.
A few weeks later, she received a call.
At the time, SpillConsult was still relatively small. Founded in 2012 by industry specialists Rob and Stu, the company initially focused on oil SpillConsultancy and emergency response planning for the energy sector.
The founders needed someone who could support tender writing and proposals so their consultants could focus on fee-earning work.
What they saw in Vicki was not sector expertise, but attitude.
“They needed somebody willing to roll their sleeves up,” she says. “In a small business, you just do what needs doing.”
She joined three days a week as Tender and Proposal Coordinator.
That role quickly expanded.
Growing Alongside the Business
At SpillConsult, Vicki found an environment where initiative mattered more than rigid job descriptions.
When the business needed help improving its LinkedIn presence, she volunteered — despite having no marketing background.
“I just thought, well, I’ll figure it out.”
She researched, asked questions, spoke to contacts, and learned as she went.
That same mindset shaped her wider role inside the company. Rather than staying confined to administration, Vicki naturally began improving systems, solving operational bottlenecks, and taking pressure away from the founders.
“I’m always thinking, ‘Could we do this better?’”
Over time, her responsibilities evolved organically into operations leadership.
Today, SpillConsult delivers incident management training, emergency response consultancy, and crisis exercises across a wide range of global risks — from oil spills and cyber incidents to helicopter ditching, mass evacuations, and major accidents.
The company has become internationally recognised for its Incident Command System (ICS) training — a methodology originally developed in the United States for wildfire response before being adapted by SpillConsult for the global energy sector.
That evolution itself reflects the entrepreneurial nature of SMEs.
The founders recognised that existing emergency management frameworks did not translate effectively into oil and gas operations. Instead of accepting the limitation, they built something better.
“It snowballed from there,” Vicki explains. “Companies saw it working elsewhere and wanted the same support.”
The Power of SMEs to Develop People
One of the strongest themes in Vicki’s story is how SMEs create space for people to grow beyond traditional job boundaries.
In large organisations, roles are often tightly defined. In smaller businesses, capability can expand rapidly if somebody is willing to take ownership.
“I’ve never stayed in my lane,” Vicki says with a smile.
That willingness to learn has allowed her to move across industries, functions, and responsibilities without formal retraining at every stage.
Her story challenges the idea that careers must follow a perfectly planned trajectory.
Instead, it highlights the value of adaptability, curiosity, and relationship-building — qualities increasingly essential in modern business.
Advice for Future Leaders
Looking back, Vicki believes much of her progress came from staying open to opportunities rather than rigidly planning every step.
“You don’t have to know exactly where you’re heading,” she says. “But you do need to stay willing to learn.”
She also believes younger professionals sometimes underestimate the importance of relationships and attitude.
“Skills can be taught,” she says. “But being someone people trust, someone who gets stuck in — that matters enormously.”
It is advice that resonates strongly within the SME community, where collaboration, flexibility, and reputation often matter as much as formal credentials.
Looking Ahead
Today, SpillConsult continues expanding its consultancy capability into broader all-hazard emergency planning and incident response. As organisations face increasingly complex operational and cyber risks, the company’s expertise has never been more relevant.
For Vicki, the journey still centres on the same motivation that first shaped her career: helping people, solving problems, and making things work better.
It is not the career path she imagined at 16.
But perhaps that is exactly the point.
The most meaningful careers are not always carefully mapped from the beginning. Sometimes they are built through curiosity, resilience, and the courage to keep stepping into unfamiliar territory.