Larkenby

Situation

Bacton Transport Services is a family-owned business in its third generation, now led by Charles and Edward Downie, the grandsons of its founder. We started to talk to them in connection to their imminent move to a new depot headquarters, with increased capacity and a landmark location beside the A14, the main artery from Felixstowe Port to the Midlands and outward across the UK, an area heavily populated by the haulage industry.

Their move means growth, and growth requires focus. The Downies’ plan included creating a new leadership team with directors focused on core areas of the business (operations, HR and commercial) supported by senior level managers for other business requirements. Empowering this team requires clarity of vision and expectations, and so Bacton invited us to work with them to identify and articulate values that would give people across the business the ambition and dedication required for this growth: with the challenge that many of their staff are a long way from HQ either driving or located at client premises.

Process

We first met the team who were destined for director and senior leadership roles long before the move to their new depot, and facilitated a workshop in which we discussed what values bring to an organisation, what Bacton’s values might be, and how the process would work. Following this meeting they and other team members proposed a long list of staff, suppliers and clients, ensuring we had a mix of levels, length of connection, even picking some with whom they knew there were issues.

We contacted those people to explain the purpose of our work, to ask their support by sparing the time for a one-to-one phone or video conference call (lockdown had just been imposed), and to share with them the form our interview would take. Of those approached around 60% agreed to a call, and over the next weeks we had a wide ranging and informative set of conversations.

These revealed excellent insights. There were very clear patterns of behaviour and expectation. It was heartening to discover how kind the business sets out to be to its team, and how flexible when need be. (In fact I am starting to believe that the organisations that commission this intuitively tend towards kindness, and are seeking to marshall it.) We also found a clear vocabulary and tone of voice that made the style we needed to adopt very clear. Additionally we were told of service and communications issues that needed an immediate response, which we reported back straight away for the Bacton team to deal with.

From this set of conversations, some follow ups and reviews of our notes, we developed a succinct and relevant set of values that would help the owners and leadership team create a culture of excellence and effort across the business. We called them ‘The Bacton Way’ and alongside that we built a narrative that set out the vision and values, their importance and the ‘why’ of the business.

Hand in hand with this, the senior team was working to understand what vision they could put in place that would inspire this level of effort. They landed on ‘To join the Motor Transport Top 100 by 2025’ – a vision that summarises scale, income and capacity in an accessible way.

We presented The Bacton Way to the team, and their feedback was incorporated into edits that took on board their requirements for real-world application and changed a few of the words used; they were commendably focused on what would land with their team, in their daily working lives. Having agreed on the precise phrases, we then worked together in a pair of workshops spread over two months on how these could be explained as single words, in context and what they meant for people’s behaviours.

In the time we had been working with Bacton, COVID 19 and Brexit had a huge impact on their industry, with lorry driver shortages widely reported and having a knock-on effect to retail supply chains and customer service. On the good side, Bacton moved into their new depot in the summer of 2021, had not suffered as badly as many of their peers with drivers leaving, and ensured that the whole team, at base and spread out across the UK, felt valued and appreciated. The team had grown and a new generation of mid-level leaders was now being developed to support the ongoing flourishing of Bacton Transport Services.

So our final two workshops were held with the new emerging leaders as well as their established directors and senior leaders, ensuring that this vital team was brought into the process, contributing and ensuring The Bacton Way would help them to deliver their aims. We reviewed the process so far, generated ideas of ways that the values could be brought to life in areas of the business, and finally presented these back to them as a starting point for their successful launch.

Next steps

The values were launched in early 2022, with directors and senior leaders developing plans to integrate them within their own areas of responsibility. A large wall at the entrance of the new depot has the values applied by a signwriter: and in a twist that really shows focus, not just the values but also brief descriptions of what they mean in context.

The Bacton Way has been brought into team development, to ensure that each and every member of staff is benefiting from the values and growing through them. Bacton has continued to demonstrate that with vision and values growth is possible even in challenging times, and their resilience is reaping its rewards.

“Erika has an intuitive understanding for the relevance of ethos and culture in the modern workplace. Working with her helped us to bring our values to life and articulate them in a way which all our people, customers and suppliers can relate to as practical, demonstrable and sincere. The Bacton Way has become an important part of life at the company and a key part of our strategy for growing the business.”

Charles Downie, Managing Director, Bacton Transport Services

Situation

Erika launched Spring, the agency for change, in 2005, leaving an agency career in London to set it up in Southwold with her husband, the architectural photographer Simon Hazelgrove. They arrived with no clients and gave it three months. A major account win right at the end of that period secured Spring’s future and over the next decade it grew exponentially: clearly they had tapped into a gap in the market.

As experts in their trades – Erika’s being brand communications – but not yet in business management, they had to learn some things the hard way: chief of which was that at a certain scale values cease to be intuitive, culture starts to be set by omission, and not facing up to difficult conversations and tough decisions can only take you in one direction.

Sure enough by the time the team reached thirty people, the reputation and ethos they had worked so hard to fulfil were starting to suffer. On the face of it the business was hugely successful: as is so often the case, it’s hard to see the problems from outside but as a business leader they become very apparent to you in your talent attraction and retention, client relationships, and profitability.

It was at that stage that Erika joined a Vistage group chaired by the phenomenal David Sheepshanks, which introduced her to business tools including Pete Wilkinson’s Reclaro 1-3-5 business plan and Floyd Woodrow’s Compass for Life. With the support of these processes, her coach David, and the CEO peers in the Vistage group, she set out on the process of transforming the agency’s culture and fortunes.

Process

Erika started to mentor Spring’s team members individually using the 1-3-5 format and materials around it to spark ideas. Individual plans were built alongside the overarching business plan for Spring which Erika, Simon and senior team members agreed. Over the course of the first six months she worked with every member of staff to help them set a personal vision, identify challenges and set out active, quantifiable steps to tackle those challenges.

Alongside this, Erika led a programme of workshops whereby the agency’s core values were discussed, debated, and finally agreed. The starting point for this was Erika’s own personal values set, and although the agency’s ethos was different in many respects, it’s clear to see how closely they aligned with hers. Involving all team members in co-creating the Spring ethos ensured that everyone involved could consider how their own values sat alongside that of the agency; an important thing for anyone who works within an organisation.

The values set also follows a very clear logic: from first encounter, to understanding a brief, to delivering excellence continually, to delivering beneficial outcome, to being focused on change. The language is clear and simple, each action has three words to create a rhythm. Every phrase in the set is a clear action.

Having set the values with collaboration across the team, Erika then spearheaded the process of stitching them into every single aspect of Spring’s work and vision. From the team mentoring – which continued on a 6-weekly basis from then on – to contracts, sales packs, supplier agreements, recruitment advertising, even decisions about rewards and perks, service creation and in short, every step, breath and process inside and outside the business. This became her principal focus, and over the course of the next five years the team shrank in scale before growing again, and at the same time grew in capability, commitment and confidence.

As a direct and perfect outcome of this focus on ethos and culture, a small team, largely formed of people whose entire careers have been at Spring, has grown to Senior Leader level. Since early 2021 this team has taken day to day charge of the business, its strategy and management and in the perfect conclusion to this tale of Active Ethos, in March 2022 they took on the agency as its new owners.

Next steps

What Erika has learned from the process is that values-led-culture influences every single aspect of business strategy and delivery, ensures everyone on the team is at their best on a daily basis, fosters a level of emotional clarity that delivers honesty, makes a business exemplar amongst its peers, delivers exponential growth and that, as the owner and Director of a business, it is the number one creator of ownership in your team. It’s this utter focus on stitching your values into every single aspect of the business that has led to the term Active Ethos.

She has also experienced it at its toughest and knows it is not an easy thing to do, and that often the person who heads up the process is a lone voice until a long way through. It is her complete commitment to driving ethos through her own business that has compelled her to focus now on supporting other business leaders to do the same, lean on her for support when it is challenging, and reap the rewards of their commitment to the process.