Elliot Maclean
Founder and Managing Director
Elliot Maclean is the founder and owner of EGM Family Holdings and co-founder of Edvance. He sets the group’s direction and leads its software engineering and client work, bringing experience in audit, law, teaching, governance and senior leadership, and a consistent aim of making positive change wherever he works.
EGM exists to give organisations software and business solutions that work in practice. Elliot engages at both ends of the scale, building businesses from the ground up and solving operational problems for large organisations. His work is grounded in the rigour of his audit training. Every solution is built to be verifiable, controlled and defensible. His particular interest is managing change so that it produces positive-sum outcomes, where efficiency savings, stronger governance and ecological and social gains reinforce one another rather than compete.
He read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Lancaster University and began his career as a financial sector auditor at Deloitte before studying law and retraining as a teacher. Ten years in schools in the UK, the UAE and China followed, as a teacher governor and later as Director of Global Citizenship within the Dulwich College International group, where he established the department and grew its work across two schools.
It was in schools that he saw how much safeguarding depended on records that were hard to keep and harder to act on. He designed and built Vigilance, a safeguarding record system, to make the effective safeguarding of children easier for the staff responsible for it. Vigilance became the foundation of Edvance, which he co-founded to take it to schools, and the same approach of building what an organisation actually needs led him to found EGM Family Holdings.
