We’re delighted to welcome Adele Blackham to Ascend as our new Head of Strategic Partnerships. Adele has spent her entire career in payroll, and she’s rejoining old colleagues Stewart Waddell and Richard Rowell, bringing a wealth of experience in client relationships, bureau operations and business development.
Starting out
Adele’s career began with a YTS placement in the payroll team at a car dealership, where she stayed for eight years before moving into payroll at Wincanton, a transport and warehouse distribution company. It was an in-house team, but one with a twist – alongside running payroll for major retail contracts including Asda, the team also supported and audited a network of satellite payrolls. It was Adele’s first taste of managed payroll, long before she had a name for it.
She spent 18 years at Wincanton, working closely with HR, unions and pay negotiations, and progressing from team leader to supervisor to payroll manager, stepping up each time a gap opened rather than waiting for the perfect moment.
“Sometimes being thrown in at the deep end is the best way to learn,” Adele says. It was during this period that she had her first real introduction to the CIPP, studying for her team leader and supervisory qualifications under a tutor who would later be recognised with a lifetime achievement award.
Centralising, outsourcing and a hard decision
As Wincanton grew, Adele was seconded onto a project that would reshape her understanding of payroll. She helped roll out a single time and attendance system across every site, running it in parallel with manual spreadsheets before the business began centralising its satellite payrolls. The end point was outsourcing, and with this change, the team were offered the chance to move across with the contract or take redundancy.
Adele chose to step away and look for a new challenge, which she found with managed payroll provider, Dataplan, where she joined as Operations Manager. She was keen to work for a smaller operation, and despite sales being her biggest fear, she actually found she enjoyed selling the service. “It was never really about selling a product,” Adele explains. “It was a service, and payroll is all I’ve ever known, so talking to clients about it just came naturally.”
That comfort with people became the foundation for a formal client services function, which Adele helped build the team from the ground up, moving the business towards a more joined-up focus on every client relationship.
When Dataplan was bought by a large software corporation, Adele’s remit broadened again, taking on both operational and client services responsibilities and getting to grips with a fast-growing education service.
Building Ascend’s partnerships
In 2025, Adele took time out, but the pull of payroll proved too strong, and when the opportunity came up at Ascend Payroll to once again build a role in a fast-growth business, she jumped at the chance.
In her new role, as Head of Strategic Partnerships, Adele is focused on getting Ascend’s name in front of the right people. That means reconnecting with contacts built over a decades-long payroll career, representing the business at industry events, and building strategic partnerships with like-minded companies.
Businesses that ‘get’ what we are all about and deliver a premium quality service to their clients.
“We’re really pleased to have Adele back in the industry and part of the Ascend team,” says Stewart Waddell, CEO. “Her experience across payroll operations, client services and now business development means she understands both sides of every partnership we build, what our clients need and what makes a referral worth making. That combination is exactly what this role needs.”
We’re excited to see where Adele takes Ascend’s partnerships next.
