Introducing Talent Talks, the podcast where we dive into all things talent in the real estate, construction, and infrastructure world. From the boardroom to the building site, we’ll uncover the stories, insights, and people shaping our industry today. We shine a spotlight on data centres, one of real estate's fastest-growing and most in-demand sectors.

In this episode, Sarah Davenport, Managing Director at Capstone, and Oli Coote, Data Centre and Real Estate Sector Lead, speak to Alex Iveson, a senior business development professional with a career spanning client strategy, relationship management, and the data centre sector. Alex shares her non-linear career journey, from dropping out of university and starting in an admin role, to moving into bid management and, eventually, landing in the data centre industry while at JLL. She discusses the transition from bid management to a business development role at Infra Partners, and highlights her passionate advocacy for inclusion as the co-founder of the Forum for Women in Data Centres and the Leap Initiative.

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You can read the transcript of the discussion below:

Sarah 
Today on Capstone's Talent Talk podcast, we are joined by Alex Iveson, a senior business development professional with a career rooted in client strategy, relationship management, and the data centre industry, as well as other sectors prior to that. 

Alex has built her experience across organisations such as JLL and has played a pivotal role in leading bids and commercial pursuits across the EMEA region. She now works within a data centre design and build business that looks to cut costs and construction speeds, speeding up the construction process, amongst other benefits. 

Beyond her day job, Alex is a passionate advocate for inclusion and progression within our industry. She's also the co-founder of the Forum for Women in Data Centres and the Leap Initiative, two platforms focused on driving meaningful change and creating a space for underrepresented voices in the sector. 

Alex, welcome, thank you for joining Oli and I. 

Alex 
Thank you for having me, it's a pleasure. 

Sarah 
So let's start talking about your career. What's got you to the point of success that you're in now? 

Not all careers are linear. And I've personally heard yours previously, and I absolutely love it, which is why I've asked you to be a guest with us today. 

Alex 
It's definitely not been linear. I grew up in South East London and worked from a very young age. I've always had a job, not in a corporate sense, but I've always worked, and I dropped out of university in my first year when I was 19. I was pregnant with my daughter, so I didn't get a formal education as such. When she was about four months old, I started temping in an admin role for a company called Cerner, a software company that specialised in healthcare software. 

From there, I worked my way up within Cerner for a few years and then moved on to work in some more healthcare software companies, eventually landing in legal and e-discovery software. There, I spent quite a few years building my career, specialising in bid development mainly and supporting commercial and project opportunities across EMEA and the world. 

I fell into data centres accidentally, as most people seem to do. I was working for JLL at the time, and I was on the bid team supporting real estate bids, specifically for technology for real estate. So, it was a bit different from data centres. 

The data centre team needed some support on some bids and some opportunities that we had coming in and they were quite a new team at the time. So, they pulled me in. I was very reluctant, basically said wasn't interested in data centres, didn't know what they were, didn't really want to get involved in that sector, didn't want to work on the project. 

It wasn't given much of a choice, thankfully in retrospect, but met a fantastic team and was able to really work on some really interesting projects. And suddenly found myself in an interesting sector. Lots of things going on, lots of change, lots of growth, and I decided to stick around and see where it would take me. So yeah, a non-linear pathway, but I've been with Infra Partners now for six months. So, we work on prefabricated data centres, which reduces construction costs, and also time to market, which you mentioned. 

Sarah 
That's great. So how did you find that each role has helped you prepare for the next? 

Alex 
Well, that's a good question. Starting off in admin meant that you effectively start being the person to whom everybody gives other jobs. Everyone's always asking you to do things for them. Can you book some travel? Can you do this? Can you organise these events? 

It gives you a really good introduction to the different aspects of the business because you work across all of the different sections of an organisation. I was an executive support assistant for a couple of years, particularly in a big corporate company. 

I worked really closely with the C-Suite, which I think gave me some really good grounding and communication skills because they needed a different type of communication than I was used to. I learnt to talk to pretty much anyone, any stage in their career, which I think was really helpful and has definitely supported me going forward. 

I think that's the thing for me: learning how to communicate with different people. Over the last few years, especially, I have realised that I could bring my authentic self to work and be the person that I am outside of work and in work as well. 

That's been a really big step for me. And development-wise, it's so important. 

Sarah 
I'm interested in that you've been heavily involved in the bid management and now you've moved into more of a proactive business development role. How did you find that transition? 

Alex 
Some of the key skills that I picked up in bid management, being able to work across teams, coordinating lots of stakeholders and communicating objectives have really helped me in the business development space. 

I'm doing a mix of account management and business development and still supporting some of our proposals. Infra Partners is a start-up; we're still relatively small. So, there are lots of opportunities to get involved in lots of different things, which very much suits me. 

But yeah, I think just building on those skills, I think being able to take technical information from people who are subject matter experts and turn it into digestible content for a reader who might not be technical in nature. That's massively helped, particularly in this industry, because a lot of what we do is so highly technical. 

But to be able to take that messaging and the key points and deliver it to potential clients in a way that they understand has been a huge benefit. That's the key thing for me from the bid management background and how it's helped me now. 

Sarah 
Do you get a good insight into what clients in that sector really value? Did you pick up a sense of what they feel is important to them and what they may prioritise? 

Alex 
Yeah, I mean in the data centre market, everybody's prioritising land, power and speed to market. That is all that everybody talks about at the moment. And we're obviously going through a period of huge growth. I think it has given me a good understanding of what clients need. 

But more than anything, my background in bids has given me the skill set to, again, take that technical information and present it in a way that actually meets their requirements. We talk a lot about addressing pain points in bids. 

Understanding what the client’s issue is. They're not going out to market for a piece of software because everybody's just decided this software looks fancy. They've got a real issue that's driving that commercial spend. 

It's the same with data centres, really. When they're looking to build a data centre, they're looking for a return on investment. And in this sector, there's a significant amount of investment that goes into building a data centre. It's understanding what their drivers are, what their pain points are, and working out how we can address them better. 

Sarah 
How do you do that? What are the main pain points? 

Alex 
I think it depends on the client. Land and power are pain points for everyone at the moment. I think it depends on the client and what they're looking to get out of that investment. Some people that I've spoken to, if you're talking to a hyperscaler, they've got a different focus from somebody who's looking to invest just as a financial investor, a financial backer in the data centre field. 

And it's driven by the market. Everybody is now using AI tools. The need for data centres and the need for critical infrastructure is only increasing every year, and is only going to increase. So yeah, that's a big driver, actually just delivering the infrastructure that's needed, because at the moment, let's face it, we're pretty behind, and it's going to take some time to catch up. 

Oli 
I was going to say, that's in terms of where you are at the moment, Infra Partners, keeping up with that imbalance between supply and demand, that speed to market, and the fact that you're working with these prefabricated solutions that, I'm sure, are working to address a fairly significant pain point for lots of people. 

Alex 
Yes, it's been interesting. Some of the clients that we're working with have always built a traditional stick-build data centre, and they're seeing the value in being able to prefabricate those data centres, take a design, and make it more modular. Also, building in the factory reduces the need for skilled labour in particular areas. 

A lot of data centres are built in the middle of nowhere, wherever there's that power and land available. So there's not necessarily a skilled workforce in the area, and you do need a lot of skilled people. 

You guys obviously work in supplying those resources, so you know what it's like. But yeah, that's a real challenge in general. And we can reduce that pain for our clients. 

Sarah 
Where do you manufacture? 

Alex 
We have a manufacturing facility in Romania that covers our European clients. We just launched in Houston, Texas, which is pretty exciting. We're hoping to go out there soon to see the new factory space that's, I think, three times the size of our Romanian facility. So it's a pretty significant space that we've got going over there, and we're looking at Asia in 2026, I believe. 

Oli 
What sort of scale in terms of the size of any given facility that you're able to create, what sort of size are we working in? 

Alex 
The sky's the limit. We've got some clients in the US looking at campuses, so it's a huge scale. Yeah, it's pretty exciting. And then from one megawatt up, it’s amazing. 

Sarah 
I'm a massive believer that we all have big influential moments or people in our career. Those people might not know that then, but you can often look back and think that person, I can see how they really shaped my career for the good or the bad, I suppose. But I'm talking about positive. And I'm really interested to hear what's been your biggest influential moment or person in your career, and how that shaped you. 

Alex 
Yeah, I have a couple. So the first one that comes to mind is a lady called Paula Cross. And so I worked with her at Cerner as an exec admin. I was supporting her boss, who was heading up the sales team, with admin support. And I kept asking her all the time. She wasn't in the office very often, but whenever she was I was like "Paula, have you got anything I can do? I'm a little bit bored if you've got anything I can do." Basically nagged her all the time until she said, "Look, you're clearly not getting what you need out of the job that you have. Do you want to come work for me?" 

She took me under her wing. She organised a role to be built for me, which still allowed me to do some of the admin stuff that I'd been doing, but actually moved me into bid support, which was how I got into bids in the first place. So yeah, just constantly nagging someone to give me something to do that was a bit more interesting. So I'd definitely say Paula was a key part of my career journey. 

I never would have got into bid management. I don't think she hadn't given me an opportunity to try it out, particularly on a temp basis at the start. She was going, look, if you like it, once you're in, I can train you, teach you everything you need to know about bids, but you've got the right attitude, and I need support because I'm drowning. It worked well for both of us. And yeah, I've obviously built a career out of bid management. That's how I started. So massively grateful to Paula for her support. 

And then the other is Hannah Sutton who I worked with at JLL. So Hannah was the person that I was brought in to support very reluctantly on my first data centre project. And Hannah heads up the project development services for JLL across EMEA. She's just such an inspiring person to spend time with. 

She really drove home for me the idea of being your authentic self at work, having a value that you bring to the table, and making sure that you're aware of it yourself but not scared to let other people know that you recognise that as well. 

And that's just been really big for me. I had a lot of that, coming into the industry, I'm not technical, I'm not an engineer. I couldn't really see that there was a space for me within this sector. And I was worried that I was diving into a sector that I would never get anywhere in. 

So, actually seeing somebody again, she's a project manager by background and seeing that she'd made a really successful career for herself in the industry was just really inspiring. And she's just a really nice person, which helps. 

Sarah 
I love that. It's interesting actually, because we recorded with Marynet Bassily last week. We love Marynet, and she had a Paula in her life in one of her first roles. And it was Paula who gave her some small-scale procurement projects to work on. And we all need that, don't we? 

Alex 
Yeah, definitely. And I'm trying to do that for other people as well. And that's trying to bring people into the industry. 

Sarah 
I love that your commitment to driving that diversity piece, but proactively through action with, both obviously the forum for women in data centres and the LEAP initiative. So why don't you tell us a bit about both of those and what that looks like, and the impact it's having. 

Alex 
The forum for women in data centres was the brainchild of Barbara Sasha Kundle and she got a group of us together to co-found that. I think there's 16 of us across different companies within the data centre space, but also with completely different backgrounds and roles. 

We've got a real eclectic mix of people as part of that steering group, and it's just been absolutely phenomenal. I've loved every minute of being involved in that. It's been great for me personally to build a network and give back in an actionable and meaningful way. 

It's just been so fantastic. We've run a lot of events. You know, you guys have seen that we're active on LinkedIn. We do a lot of events. We do events in person, mainly focused around London at the moment, but there are plans to expand regionally. And so, we're going to do some more events in other countries as well, which is quite exciting. 

We're working with some partners in that space. But alongside the events, we're actually launching a mentorship scheme. As you know, I'm really keen on mentoring, and I think it's a really beneficial idea both for the mentees and the mentors themselves because I've got a lot out of mentoring people. 

So, I'm really looking forward to the forum launching as well. But we just want to be a safe space to encourage and support women in this industry. We are a minority in the industry, and this is a traditionally male-focused space, but there are lots of us now. And I think having that space to share stories and to meet other women in the industry has just been fantastic. 

Sarah 
I mean, collectively, you might be a small forum, but you're loud and mighty with that. And I've loved seeing how involved and committed the community around that is. And what are you hearing from women in data centres to be the main topics, opportunities, and challenges? 

Alex 
Yeah, I think we've seen we've had a lot of comments about imposter syndrome. 

This idea that I touched on a little bit before about not really seeing where you fit within the industry. And a lot of people are saying to us, just seeing you guys being a public forum, it's actually helped them to see that there's a space for them in the sector. 

That's a really big thing for many women and probably many men as well. But I'm not sure if they're as open about feeling that imposter syndrome as women are. And I think just addressing issues that affect women. So, we get to a certain age, and you get physical things like the menopause. 

Sarah 
I think actually we're looking to do series and talks on that. Don't even start me on the perimenopause, honestly. That's a whole other podcast anyway. 

Alex 
Yeah, it's one of those topics that I think we just need to share a bit more, and people need to be a bit more open in general. I'm pretty much an open book, but that's not always a good thing.