The heat comes first. Not the kind you can explain away with a stuffy room or a bad night’s sleep, but something that rises from underneath, uninvited, in the middle of a client call. She keeps talking. She keeps smiling. Her blouse sticks to her back and her thoughts scatter mid-sentence, and still she keeps going, because stopping was never part of the plan.
Nobody in the room notices. That’s the strange cruelty of it. She built her entire career on reading people, on knowing exactly what a candidate needed to hear and exactly what a client wasn’t saying out loud. And now her own body is sending signals nobody around her has been trained to see.
She finishes the call. She closes her laptop. And she sits there for a moment, wondering how many other women in that exact position are doing the exact same thing right now, alone, in silence, pretending everything is fine.
Meet Julie Grimes
Julie Grimes is the founder of Me vs Menopause, a St Albans based coaching and corporate training practice that brings menopause out of whispered conversations and into boardrooms, HR strategies, and leadership training rooms across the UK. What defines her isn’t the credential after her name. It’s the fact that she spent two decades building other people’s careers before rebuilding her own from the ground up, using the very thing that once threatened to derail her as the foundation.
Twenty Years of Placing Others
Julie’s working life started long before menopause ever entered the conversation. From 2002 she moved through recruitment, first as a senior recruiter in Watford, then as a branch manager overseeing a team of consultants in St Albans, where she grew revenue by more than sixty percent and placed over 150 candidates in her first year alone. She was good at this. Genuinely good.
By 2011 she had launched Jaguar White Recruitment, building it into a specialist practice across office, administration, finance, HR, sales, and IT roles. For thirteen years she ran it as Managing Director, coaching candidates through CV reviews and interview nerves, helping nervous professionals walk into rooms with their shoulders back. She won awards for it. In 2020, in the middle of a pandemic that broke countless small businesses, she was recognized as a Shining Star for keeping hers not just alive but strong.
What nobody outside her closest circle knew was that somewhere in those final years, her own body had started changing the terms of the deal. Perimenopause arrived the way it does for most women, quietly, then all at once, and there was no framework at Jaguar White or anywhere else that told her what to do with it. She had spent her whole career helping people find where they belonged. She couldn’t find that for herself.
So in 2024, after thirteen years running her own agency, Julie made the kind of decision most people only talk about. She closed one chapter entirely and enrolled in a menopause coaching diploma, training in hormone health, mindset, and workplace impact from the ground up. She wasn’t reinventing herself for the sake of novelty. She was finally building the thing she had needed and never had.
The Business Built From Lived Experience
Me vs Menopause launched in October 2024, and from the outset Julie refused to treat it as a private, whispered service tucked into a wellness afternoon. She has taken the conversation somewhere it rarely goes: into governance meetings, board rooms, and leadership strategy sessions, working alongside organizations like Beyond Governance to reframe menopause as a retention issue, not a personal inconvenience.
“This isn’t just an HR conversation. It’s a boardroom one,” she has said of the work, and the distinction matters more than it might first appear. HR conversations get scheduled, siloed, quietly resolved or quietly ignored. Boardroom conversations shape policy, succession planning, and whether talented women stay in senior roles or quietly exit the workforce during the most disruptive years of their working lives.
Her sessions cover the practical alongside the personal: symptom recognition in high pressure roles, the effect on progression and leadership pipelines, and what organizations can actually build into policy rather than simply acknowledge in a values statement. She has spoken to governance professionals who admitted they’d never had this conversation with a board before, and audiences of HR leaders looking for language they could take straight back to their own teams.
She’s equally direct about the science. When public conversations muddy the facts around HRT, conflating outdated data with modern treatment, Julie pushes back publicly, encouraging women to speak with menopause specialists rather than accept secondhand fear. “HRT could have such a transformational change to enhance ladies’ lives,” she wrote recently, urging women not to let outdated headlines override informed medical guidance. It’s a small moment that reveals a larger pattern: she treats accurate information as a form of respect, not an afterthought.
What separates her approach from a generic wellness offering is the insistence that every woman’s experience is unique. She doesn’t hand out a single protocol. She builds a plan around hormone education, nutrition, mindset, and lifestyle, tailored to the person sitting across from her, whether that’s a solopreneur, a senior manager, or a board director quietly wondering if she’s the only one struggling.
The Grimes Playbook: 5 Lessons
Symptoms don’t stay in one room. What shows up at your desk at 2pm follows you home. Treat it as a whole-life issue, not a workplace inconvenience to manage around.
Silence costs more than the conversation does. The women who say nothing are often the ones organizations lose first, quietly, without ever knowing why.
Get your information from specialists, not headlines. Outdated fear about treatment options keeps women suffering longer than they need to.
Policy without culture is just paperwork. A supportive workplace needs both the framework and the everyday permission to use it.
Your own experience is not a liability. It’s your credibility. What you lived through and struggled with alone is exactly what qualifies you to build something better for others.
Full Circle
That woman on the client call, sweating through a moment nobody else could see, was never a stranger to Julie. She was Julie, more times than she can count, across thirteen years of running a business where stopping wasn’t an option and asking for help wasn’t modeled by anyone around her.
Today, when she walks into a boardroom to talk about perimenopause and succession planning in the same breath, she’s speaking directly to every version of herself who once sat through a meeting in silence. She didn’t wait for the workplace to catch up. She built the room she needed and then held the door open behind her.
She never stopped placing people. She just finally started with herself.
Julie Grimes, Certified Menopause Coach CPD, is the founder of Me vs Menopause, based in St Albans, England. She provides menopause coaching, corporate training, and boardroom advisory to individuals, senior leadership teams, and organizations across the UK.
