Clarity before action. Strategy that holds.
Clear Lantern Hub started in early 2019 when Janet Harrington left a full-time operations role she had held for eleven years. The decision was not impulsive. For the last two of those years she had been doing informal advisory work for two smaller organisations on the side, and it became obvious that the problems she found most interesting were not the ones her employer was paying her to solve. She registered the business, took on her first paying client in March 2019, and has kept the practice deliberately small since then.
The name came from a specific frustration. In her corporate years, Janet sat through a lot of strategy sessions that produced confident-sounding language and very little usable direction. The image she kept returning to was a lantern that looked bright from a distance but gave off no actual light when you needed to see where you were walking. The work here is the opposite of that: the goal is a clear picture of where you are, what is in the way, and what to do next, in that order.
Seven years in, the practice works with eight to twelve organisations per year. Engagements run from a single four-week diagnostic to multi-quarter advisory relationships. The client mix skews toward founder-led businesses and small nonprofits navigating a transition: a leadership change, a funding shift, a market that moved faster than the org chart did. Janet does not take every enquiry. If the fit is not right, she will say so in the first call and, where she can, point toward someone who is a better match.
Janet Harrington spent eleven years in operations and product strategy at a mid-size logistics firm before going independent in 2019. She led the firm's restructuring through two consecutive quarters of contraction, which is where she developed the diagnostic frameworks she now uses with clients. She holds a graduate certificate in organisational design and has a habit of keeping a paper notebook for every engagement. No exceptions. When she is not working with clients, she runs long distances on weekend mornings and reads more annual reports than most people would consider reasonable.