The Hardest Part Was the Decision.. A Conversation with Ans Aspden
with Ans Aspden · Co-founder & CEO, Stable Resources, Stable Resources
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About Ans Aspden
Ans Aspden is the co-founder and CEO of Stable Resources, a Microsoft-focused technology resourcing company she built alongside her husband Dave. She spent twenty-six years at the BBC, beginning just before her 18th birthday by accident, and rose to lead digital and interactive teams across major brands including Doctor Who and a factual project pitched to NASA. She formally joined Stable Resources eleven years ago and has led its growth into a team of over 100 people. She is also a trustee of Adoption UK, where she has run peer support groups for adopted adults for more than a decade.
Episode Description
Ans Aspden, co-founder and CEO of Stable Resources, reflects on twenty-six years at the BBC, the accidental career she shaped on purpose, and the moment she finally chose to leave it all behind.
Key Moments
After twenty-six years at the BBC, building a career she had never planned but had learned to love, Ans Aspden made the decision to leave and step fully into Stable Resources. It was a decision that had taken years to reach. Her father told her the hardest part was always getting there. Once made, a weight would be lifted. He was right.
Being in the room matters, even when you cannot see why. Every skill acquired across a long career, even the ones that feel irrelevant, will arrive exactly when the next path needs them.
Ans Aspden did not plan to work at the BBC. Just short of her 18th birthday, she lost the application form for a police career we can perhaps say that she had been quietly romanticising, largely because she had always loved detective dramas! The following week, a careers advisor from the BBC arrived at her business college. She filled in that form instead, and what was supposed to be a three-month placement became a career of twenty-six years.
An accidental career, shaped on purpose
Those twenty-six years were not a straight line. She started in the general office, cut her first radio programme using quarter-inch tape, razor blades and Sellotape, and learned to push into rooms where she felt entirely out of place. She pitched the idea of a worldwide web to a then-controller at a time when most people had not heard the phrase. She worked on interactive extensions for programmes like Tribe. She stood in a Doctor Who read-through thinking about what the website version might look like. She went to NASA to pitch an idea.
What ran through all of it was an instinct for technology as a creative medium and a habit of saying yes to things that were well outside her comfort zone. She describes herself, at heart, as a digital creative.
The moment
Stable Resources had been growing in the background for three years before Ans made the decision to leave the BBC. She knew the company was there. She could see the direction. But the decision itself came slowly, and did not come lightly.
Her father, a retired headmaster, gave her the framing she still returns to. The hardest thing, he told her, is reaching the decision. Once you have made it, a weight will be lifted.
She describes the moment not as a leap of faith so much as a recognition: that she had grown out of one role and was already growing into another. Leaving meant letting go of established brands, brilliant teams and the familiar pressure of a transmission deadline that could not move. What she was stepping toward was the chance to build something, to create the kind of environment she had always responded well to and, at times, failed to find.
She, Dave and a third team member were the first three people in Stable, and she has since become its CEO.
On what she would pass on to others
Ans does not present her story as a template. She is clear that her career was shaped by accidents as much as by choices, and that the moments that felt most like a square peg in a round hole were often the ones that turned out to matter most.
Her advice to her younger self is specific: Do not underestimate the importance of being in the room. Even when you cannot see why you are there. Even when it feels wrong. The reason tends to become visible later, sometimes, perhaps even a decade later.
For anyone standing at a similar juncture, her counsel is simpler. Believe in yourself. Look back at everything you have already done. And trust that every skill acquired across a long career, even the ones that feel irrelevant now, will arrive at exactly the moment the next path needs them.