ABOUT MARIE

I'm building a life with more freedom. I'm not going to pretend I've finished.

I’m Marie Cowgill — a coach, mentor, business leader and the founder of The Freedom Game®.

I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to understand why some people have far more choice than others — and why so many people who look successful still don’t feel particularly free.

I’ve explored that question through banking, working with wealthy clients, coaching hundreds of entrepreneurs, building businesses and making more than a few expensive mistakes of my own.

I’m still building my own version of freedom. But I’ve also deliberately created a life that, in many of the ways that matter most to me, already feels like a win.

Level 5 Coaching Professional — Distinction

EMCC Accredited Coach & Mentor — Practitioner Level

250+

Ambitious People Personally Coached

500+

People Supported Through Workshops & Accelerator Programmes

COO, Finanze

Working across Strategy, Property and Finance.

MY STORY

How I ended up thinking about freedom completely differently.

The experiences, questions and decisions that eventually became The Freedom Game®.

My obsession with freedom started long before I knew what I was looking for.

Early in my banking career, I worked in sales for one of the UK's largest banks, speaking to people from every kind of financial background.

You learn a lot about people's relationship with money when you're close enough to see what actually happens inside their accounts.

Fridays were particularly revealing.

That was often when people realised they didn't have enough money to make it through the weekend and started trying to arrange or extend overdrafts.

I saw people earning relatively ordinary salaries struggling with money.

But every now and then, a wealthier client would come through to me by accident.

And I became fascinated.

What did people with significantly more money know that I didn't?

I decided I wanted to find out.

So I deliberately worked towards moving into private and affluent banking.

I wanted to understand how people with significantly more wealth thought about money, opportunity and risk.

I wanted to listen to their conversations, understand their decisions and see whether they were playing by a fundamentally different set of rules.

More money gives you different problems. It doesn't automatically make you free.

What I found surprised me.

Some people were exceptionally good at building wealth. They understood investments, businesses, leverage and opportunity in a way I hadn’t been exposed to before.

But being a high earner didn’t automatically mean being good with money. Plenty of people simply had bigger numbers: higher incomes, bigger houses, bigger mortgages and more expensive lifestyles. Their outgoings often rose almost perfectly alongside their income.

One client consistently kept at least £2 million in his current account. When I finally persuaded him to talk about what the bank called a financial health check, he told me:

“I make money so quickly that I don’t know what to do with it.”

That was still a money problem — just a considerably better one than not having enough to get through the weekend.

That was when something clicked:

Everyone has problems with money. But some people have much better problems to solve.

Money, wealth and freedom are not interchangeable. Some people have enormous incomes and very little time. Others have impressive assets and equally impressive debt. Very few are truly free.

The same patterns show up in business.

My career eventually took me into coaching entrepreneurs through a major UK bank’s business accelerator.

Over around five years, I worked closely with people building and growing businesses. I’ve now personally coached more than 250 entrepreneurs and supported more than 500 people through workshops and accelerator programmes.

And I started seeing the same patterns from another angle.

People building businesses because they wanted freedom — then creating businesses that consumed every hour they had.

People growing revenue while becoming increasingly stressed.

People achieving goals they had once desperately wanted and immediately moving the finish line.

People with successful businesses who had lost sight of why they had started them in the first place.

And people assuming that one more milestone would finally make everything feel different.

Success does not automatically create freedom. You have to build for the life you actually want.

Leaving the bank

For years, banking was the secure option.

A salary.
A career.
A large organisation.

But after surviving three rounds of redundancies, I had to acknowledge something uncomfortable:

My income was only “secure” for as long as somebody else continued to decide that my role should exist.

At the same time, the job itself had changed. What had once been a genuinely hybrid role had gradually become far more office-based, with no more flexible working hours.

With two young children, the cost and practical reality of that no longer made sense for the life I wanted.

I wasn’t leaving because the bank was terrible.

I was leaving because the trade-off no longer fitted the person I had become or the life I was trying to build.

Some of the best decisions I've made looked like backward steps on paper.

Moving my family to Dorset was one of them.

Financially, it wasn't the obvious move.

Dorset was more expensive.

Our outgoings increased.

And in some ways, we moved further away from the neat financial milestones I thought I was supposed to be chasing.

But Dorset was where I grew up.

It was where my family was.

It was where I wanted my children to grow up.

It gave us more of the outdoor, family-centred life I'd loved when I lived in Australia.

Eventually I realised:

I couldn't spend decades waiting to earn the right to live somewhere I already knew I wanted my actual life to happen.

So I made the strategically right move for the life I wanted — even though it wasn't the financially optimal move in isolation.

THE FREEDOM GAME®

The Freedom Game grew out of all of it.

Years spent watching how people handle money.

Conversations with people at opposite ends of the income spectrum.

Time spent around wealth.

Hundreds of entrepreneurs.

My own attempts to create financial freedom.

The expensive mistakes.

The career decisions.

The competing goals.

The life choices that looked wrong on paper and felt completely right in reality.

Eventually, all of those threads started connecting.

The Freedom Game® is the framework that came out of those questions.

Not because I've completed the game in every area.

But because I've spent years learning how to play more deliberately.

Freedom is not a feeling. It's a system.

TODAY

My work now sits across three connected worlds.

THE FREEDOM GAME®

My defining body of work around building more freedom through better decisions, clearer strategy and systems that support the life you actually want.

This includes my writing, videos, podcast, resources and the ideas I'm continuing to develop.

COACHING & MENTORING

I work directly with individuals who want help thinking through important decisions, challenges, opportunities and the life or work they're trying to build.

Sometimes that's one focused conversation.

Sometimes it's ongoing private support.

FINANZE

I am COO of Finanze, working at leadership level across strategy, property and finance.

Through Finanze, our team supports clients with property procurement, finance and specialist solutions.

A few things that make me, me.

I LIVE IN DORSET WITH MY HUSBAND AND OUR TWO CHILDREN.

Moving back to Dorset was one of the least financially efficient and most personally right decisions I've made.

I HAVE A LAW DEGREE. I WAS NEVER A LAWYER.

Life had other plans.

I'VE SPENT YEARS COACHING ENTREPRENEURS.

People, businesses and the decisions behind both endlessly fascinate me.

I'M NATURALLY CURIOUS ABOUT MONEY.

Not because I think money is the point — but because it has an extraordinary ability to create or remove choices.

I CARE DEEPLY ABOUT ORDINARY TUESDAYS.

Family dinners. School runs. Slow mornings. Interesting work. Time outside. Conversations that make you think.

I AM STILL AMBITIOUS.

Wanting a life that feels good doesn't mean I've stopped wanting to build big things. I just want the things I'm building to serve my life — not consume it.

What freedom looks like to me

Choice.

Time with the people I love.

Interesting and meaningful work.

Financial security.

The ability to change direction.

Space to learn, travel, create and occasionally do something completely ridiculous simply because it sounds fun.

I want to be ambitious without building a life I need to escape from.

I want my children to remember that I was there.

I want work that matters to me without it owning every hour.

And I want the financial resilience to know that one difficult month doesn't knock everything over.

For me, freedom is having more choice over how I spend my time, what I work on and the life happening around it.

I’m still building. But I’m not waiting to live.

You don't need to have everything figured out to make a better next move.

Explore The Freedom Game® or work with me directly.

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Marie Cowgill and The Freedom Game® are trading styles of Cowgill Consulting Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales under company number 16478115. Registered office: 124 City Road, London, United Kingdom, EC1V 2NX. Email: [email protected].

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