SUPER MUM OF 6 ON TAKING HER BUSINESS FROM HER KITCHEN TABLE TO DRAGON’S DEN

SUPER MUM OF 6 ON TAKING HER BUSINESS FROM HER KITCHEN TABLE TO DRAGON’S DEN

KATE BALL, FOUNDER OF MINI FIRST AID WITH 4 of HER 6 CHILDREN © TOM PITFIELD FOR BROOD MAGAZINE

“I can’t do this and have two tiny babies at home – as well as Alfie and Grace.”

Inspirational Mum of 6, Kate Ball, started her award winning business, Mini First Aid in 2014, right from her kitchen table. She quickly saw the potential for growth and franchised the business a mere year later.  At the time, Kate had two young children, Alfie and Grace, but by 2021 when Kate appeared on the hit BBC series Dragons’ Den, she had 6 children after having two sets of twins! Kate, together with husband and business partner Matt, and four of their six children stepped into the infamous Dragons’ Den, to give an impressive pitch (even with their brood in tow). This resulted in an investment from the hugely successful, multi millionaire Mum of two, Sara Davies MBE!

We had the pleasure of sitting down with Kate at her beautiful family home, and heard all about her inspiring business journey, and the heartbreaking reason behind her drive to educate others about first aid. We also enjoyed one of our most chaotic and fun shoots to date, with Kate and the youngest four of her children – her two sets of twins, four beautiful and lively girls: Emily and Olivia, and Poppy and Amelia! 

Mini First Aid
Kate Ball Mini First Aid with her children
KATE BALL, FOUNDER OF MINI FIRST AID WITH 4 of HER 6 CHILDREN © TOM PITFIELD FOR BROOD MAGAZINE
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 Tell us a little bit about your career before starting Mini First AId and at which point in your career did you become a mum?

“I had a big corporate training role for Mars which I loved and when I had my first child, Alfie, I was really lucky to have a year’s maternity leave with full pay! It showed how much they value staff and their families, and that they want you to go back. And it was fantastic, but when you were back at work, you were BACK!  I managed to negotiate flexible working down to four days. However, this effectively meant that I was still doing my 5 day job, but in 4.I know this is a common story for so many women who return to work after having a baby. So it was really hard, but I actually fell pregnant with my second child, Grace, quite quickly (there’s only 20 months between Alfie and Grace). During my maternity leave with Grace, there was a company restructure and my job was going to change. This was going to mean more travel and time away from home. I had two young babies and I just didn’t want to do that on a regular basis. So, I took redundancy and began to look for other opportunities, which led me to some consultancy work around training and HR. But in the back of mind was always this first aid idea niggling at me.”

What inspired you to start a business in first aid and at what point did you decide to dive into the world of entrepreneurship? 

“Educating people about first aid and specifically CPR, has been something I have wanted to do ever since losing my brother, Matt. Matt had a condition called cardiomyopathy, a heart condition that we have seen in the media more recently having affected some footballers. The condition means that damage to the heart builds and then suddenly the person affected goes into cardiac arrest. When you hear about it happening to  footballers, a doctor is present, the defibrillator is there. Thankfully, we have also seen campaigns for defibrillators to be present at all grassroot football games. Unfortunately, my brother was on a beach in Portsmouth when it happened to him. There was no defibrillator and his friends did not know how to do CPR. We don’t hold them responsible in any way, but it’s always in the back of your mind: What if this group of young people knew how to do CPR until the paramedics arrived? 

So your brother Matt is very much your inspiration? 

Absolutely. I’ve always thought: What can I do to help prevent this from happening to other families? I think when somebody dies, some people go straight into activist mode and set up a charity, or start running marathons, but we as a family weren’t really there when it first happened. It was a huge shock and took a long time to get to that point. My brother was only 22 years old when he died and I was only 24, so myself and my parents were just dealing with the fact that he had gone. But it was something that was always in the back of my mind. And then when the moment came, I knew I had the skills to write quality training courses and identified a gap in the market . Accessible first aid courses weren’t readily available in my area, and that is where the germ of an idea came from.

So how did you get started with your own first aid business?

I got myself trained up and one of my mates worked as graphic designer and I paid him with a bottle of red wine to design me a logo ( The Mini First Aid logo). And he did a really thorough job and we still use that logo today! And then I started running Mini First Aid classes for parents and carers, alongside my consultancy work and juggling my two young children. In the beginning, I ran the classes in  my spare time and saw it as me doing something worthwhile, whichs gave me a bit of extra money. It grew from there and now there are over 70 franchises across the UK and we train around a thousand people adults and children every week in basic and lifesaving first aid!”

As it’s a passion project for you as well as a business, what’s the most rewarding thing about running Mini First Aid?

“We get messages from people every week telling us about different first aid situations which have happened to their baby or child, and because they attended a Mini First Aid class, they knew what to do. Often, this has saved their child’s life. We sent out a newsletter last week, about a family who managed to successfully deliver CPR to their baby, and you can’t read to the end without crying. I am not interested in getting any glory for that, but feel passionately about educating people and making a difference.  The fact that we are growing a successful business that we can earn a living from, and that all of our trainers can earn a living from, gives me a massive amount of satisfaction.”

How has your business developed over the years? 

“As well as training adults in first aid for babies and toddlers, we now train school children in first aid. In the last academic year, Mini First Aid trained 80,000 children, which is incredible! I was amazed by that, but my husband Matt – who runs all the commercial side of the business, made a point in stating that there are 6 million primary school children in the UK, so there is still a long way for us to go! [She laughs] But to go from nothing to 80,000 in 7 years, gives us a real sense of achievement! Watch this space as we’re about to introduce a new groundbreaking class!”

At what point did your husband come into the business?      

“We had just moved into our new house, done a renovation and we decided to have a third baby. When we started trying, I had a miscarriage. Sadly, it was a missed miscarriage – where you don’t miscarry the baby, so you have to have an operation – which was horrible. We had a lovely midwife who told us that although it hadn’t worked out this time around, if we wanted to get pregnant again,we should go for it. Then when I did fall pregnant, we went for the scan and there were two heartbeats! It was a proper fall off your chair moment. It felt like a gift – like the universe was saying you’ve lost one, so you’re going to have two! So it felt really lovely. And at that point I was ‘Mini First Aid’ completely on my own. I was marketing, PR, finance, website – I was everything! I was managing everything to a point and just about getting away with it, but it was very entry level and I said to Matt: “I can’t do this and have two tiny babies at home – as well as Alfie and Grace.” Matt was running an events company at the time (he’s a professional musician), so completely out of the realms of first aid. But he does know how to run a business and offered to come on board for 6 months, to give me ‘a break’ when the twins arrived. As if!’ [she laughs] Six years later, he is the Operational Director of Mini First Aid. We also have a team of 9 people in our Head Office, who look after our franchises, commercial operations and marketing etc. 

Your business is obviously like your seventh baby – especially because of the personal connection, how do you find having franchises of your business, because it can often be hard to let go and delegate when you are so passionate about your business

“Oh my god yes! It was really hard as I am a bit of a control freak. Even now, if I read something that one of our trainers has written on social media and it isn’t quite the wording I would have used, it can niggle at me. I still have to have a word with myself and say: “Right, come on Kate, it’s still getting the message out there, there’s nothing negative about it and it doesn’t matter if it’s not quite in my style.’ I also have a really good Franchise Manager , Gemma, who is really proactive in making sure everything is delivered on brand, and the style of training is replicated to the same standards throughout the franchises. But you do have to learn to let go, as your business grows or you cannot continue to expand.”

Kate Ball and her husband pitching Mini First Aid to BBC Dragon's Den
IMAGE COURTESY OF THE DAILY MAIL | © DAVID VENNI / © BBC, DRAGON’S DEN

What has been the hardest thing that you have encountered since starting your business?

“We had a situation in the very early days where someone picked up what we did and completely copied it! At the time, I felt like someone had stabbed me in the heart, because of all of the blood, sweat and tears that goes into starting a new business, and then someone just gave it a slightly different name and ran with it. It’s so hard because from a legal perspective, you can’t really do anything. We’re also teaching first aid, so you don’t want to be aggressive, because you feel like you should be saying: “It’s brilliant that you’re teaching CPR, but I just wish you weren’t doing it in the exact same way as Mini First Aid!’ I remember someone advising me to take it as a compliment. You have to have thick skin and I’m getting better, because we do have competition in the market now, as people have seen we have a good business model.  

How did appearing on Dragon’s Den change things for your company and also for you as a family as you had all six children at that point? 

“It changed things massively for us, and yes, we did have 6 children at that point! When we did our audition for the BBC, they liked our reference to children’s first aid as they thought it would work well on camera rather than demonstrating our first aid kit. So whilst we were going on there to pitch for investment for developing products, producers wanted to showcase the work we do with children. We were actually due to have other children on set with us, but then Covid hit, so they asked us to bring our own children! At first, we considered changing our pitch as there was NO way we were going to take the children on the show. But then we considered what the BBC had said, and decided we just needed to go for it! So we practised at home and even the night before, and we were still panicking that it was going to be a massive mistake. Our first set of twins were only three at the time, and you know what three year olds are like! We also didn’t want our older two to feel any pressure because that’s not fair on them. Mini First Aid is our business and we didn’t want Grace or Alfie to feel nervous, so we kept reassuring them that it was fine, and there was nothing to worry about. Our children did brilliantly and then left the set whilst Matt and I were grilled. The process is gruelling! We were thrilled to get Sara as an investor, one  – because she is a working mum and two –  because she gets us as a couple, as her husband runs her business with her. We felt that she had the right persona and we’ve been proved right. When we walked out and got into the lift we were like ‘YES! We did it! And I just burst into tears!”

What is it like working with Sara Davies and her team?

Sara and her husband, Simon are just the most down to earth, kind and lovely people. And as much as Sara can’t constantly be involved, nothing is too much trouble for her and we actually see her every quarter for half a day, which is great and we’ve done that for the last two years now. 

Sara has been a really good mentor for me. She does Facebook Live on our internal group with our franchises about twice a year, and has been a huge help with the retail side of our business. We had some retailers lined up to stock our first aid kits before the show, but hadn’t committed, and as soon as we started working with Sara and they knew about Dragons’ Den, it was a done deal. Some of them even doubled their orders. Sara opens doors for us in the media too, because she has really good connections which is invaluable!”

How did the children react to the news that you had been successful in the ‘Den’?

“What was lovely was that the children had been taken off and were being looked after. Then the crew brought the children to wait for us at the other side of the lift and told them the news before we arrived, so they literally leapt on us, shouting: “You did it!” So we all went to McDonalds to celebrate as we’d promised this to the children after the pitch. We had totally forgotten that our microphones were still on, so when all the unedited footage was sent to Sara’s team, Simon (Sara’s husband) listened to the audio file. When we met him for the first time he said: ‘We knew you were our kind of people, because you bribe your kids with McDonalds!’ [We all laugh].

What would advise other people who are only at the start of their journey in business, and how do you keep the vision through those blood sweat and tears? 

“One of the things that I would say to anyone starting a business, is to make sure you do your research and know your numbers, so that you can work out from the very beginning whether you can make some money from it. From the start, you need to look at other businesses that you like and see what they are doing well. What is it that they are doing that appeals to their audience? This can help you take the best bits, to help you build your brand. For me it wasn’t all first aid brands, as I wanted to change the way first aid brands were seen and delivered. I looked at baby brands and how accessible they were. This really helped to guide our website designer for example, as I was able to say ‘I love how this looks and can you make this bit look like that?’ So I think looking around for other brands you find aspirational and you can gain inspiration from is really important. 

And I think the final piece of advice I would give, is finding your own balance between work and family. I would never say I’m an expert because sometimes it can be a nightmare, but I really do try to work when I am ‘at work’ and be ‘in the family’ when I’m with the family. Whenever I’ve tried to mix the two, that’s when it’s gone horribly wrong! If I’m sitting with my laptop when the children come home from school, they will just climb all over me and close my laptop and I may as well give up. So sometimes that means that I might be an hour longer at work but when I’m home I can be present. To help me separate that, I used to go out to work even if that meant I went and sat in a coffee shop, but at least that way I wasn’t balancing my laptop on the playdough or getting stressed if someone made a noise whilst I was on the phone! And I know it’s not always that easy as sometimes things happen to throw a curveball when you have a family, or things don’t fit in with when people want you to do stuff. I was recently asked to sdo a radio interview at 7.30am and I had to go into the bathroom and lock the door and just pray that someone didn’t come knocking at the door shouting ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy!’ And I felt so stressed. I think sometimes I do things like that to remind myself how stressful it is and how important it is to keep it separate as much as possible!”

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PHOTOGRAPHY BY TOM PITFIELD

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GROWING A BRAND AND A BABY | WITH MASTER DISTILLER AND CO-FOUNDER OF THE SPIRIT OF MANCHESTER, SEB HEELEY

GROWING A BRAND AND A BABY | WITH MASTER DISTILLER AND CO-FOUNDER OF THE SPIRIT OF MANCHESTER, SEB HEELEY

SEB HEELEY, SPIRIT OF MANCHESTER & ADRIAN ADAIR FOR MORSON. IMAGES © BROOD MAGAZINE

In this feature, I catch up with master distiller and co-founder of The Spirit of Manchester, Seb Heeley.

Jen Wiggins and Seb Heeley started distilling gin in the dining room of their Chorlton home, with an initial run of just 100 bottles. The Christmas of 2016 the couple “distilled for 24 hours straight for 11 days to keep up with demand. We slept in two-hour stints at a time.” Fast forward 6 years and Seb and Jen have opened a Manchester city centre cocktail bar and distillery to keep up with huge demand. Their internationally recognised hero product, Manchester Gin, is one of the most awarded gins in the UK, selling over 100,000 bottles per year in the UK alone.

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We last met earlier in the year in less relaxed surroundings – on the panel of a North West Insider Business event. You spoke so passionately about your business and I enjoyed hearing about how you and your wife founded Manchester Gin. So let’s start there…

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SEB HEELEY, SPIRIT OF MANCHESTER & ADRIAN ADAIR FOR MORSON. IMAGES © BROOD MAGAZINE
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I started the business in 2016 with (my now) wife. But the idea starts way earlier. In February 2013 I was out with two of my friends… it was about half one on a Wednesday morning (yes, a school night!) and my two friends were chatting up two women. Feeling left out, I said I was going to speak to the nearest unattended woman! And there was Jen, sitting 10 feet away from me. I walked up and the first words I ever said to her were “What are you drinking?”, and the first words that she ever said to me were “Gin and tonic.”

Some classic foreshadowing there… it was meant to be!

The conversation turned into a very pretentious chat over who knew the most about gin … “this botanical doesn’t go with that one etc.” … and that started our whole love affair. Fast forward a couple of years to 2015 and we’d decided to open a bar together.

I used to work for a property developer, so the idea was that he’d buy the site (he didn’t know this), redevelop it all, and then I was going to quit and open the bar. In researching the bar, we came across what I would call ‘true small batch gin distillation’ which are tiny stills of around 30 litres. It was the first time I’d ever seen gin being made in a little back room (probably 2m x 2m). And that was our proverbial light bulb moment… we said “We’ve got a free summer, we can give this a go.” It took us 12 months to get all the licenses. When we managed to launch our first gin in 2016 our distillery was actually in our dining room, because we didn’t have a great deal of start-up capital. Our first still, which we call Wendy (who we still use to this day) was installed there, she’s a little 60 litre still which would make 100 bottles of gin.

It’s the perfect origin story – your love of gin meets the love of your life. So what’s it like being a husband and wife team, do you have dedicated roles and responsibilities?

Yeah. I try to do as little as possible!

My wife would say the same and we don’t even work together!

We always say we’re that irritating couple that actually gets on. Working side by side is never a problem and we’ve worked closely for the last seven years, every single day going home, waking up, going to sleep, always together.

As to roles, I try to do one thing once badly and then I don’t get asked again! So accounts I can’t do or anything that involves being precise and accurate, that’s Jen’s skill set. Generally, I’ll do everything that’s outward facing such as distillation, new product development, and running the distillery team.

It’s good to have complementary skill sets, makes for a great team.

Well, we always say that we complement each other. Jen will focus on the minutiae (we always say that she’s the worrier) whereas I’m just left in my little dreamland coming up with various things. And it works really well.

We talk to other people that start businesses and I think unless there are at least two of you in the business, I think it’s incredibly hard to make a real decision. If there are two of you and you make decisions together, learn together and fail together, that’s how you find success.

And of course, you have added pressure of being partners in business and life, plus you have a little boy! So, I’m curious, as business owners and parents, how do you manage a work-life balance?

I don’t think there is one in all honesty. When I was in transition from leaving a job I’d been in for nine/ten years to running my own business I remember going on a 2 week holiday and my old boss said ‘Have a great break.’ I remember saying ‘I’ve got to take the laptop to design Christmas sets’ and he said, ‘Welcome to the business owners club.’ When you start your own business there’s no work-life balance because it is your life, it’s all on you. If the work doesn’t get done, you don’t make any money and you can’t provide for yourself and your family.

Work-life balance is a funny thing – particularly for business owners. It’s quite a polarised term, suggesting that you’re not living when you’re working but if you’re passionate about what you do, you’re engaged in what you do, whether you’re an employee or an owner, you find balance. It’s often about what you feel is acceptable.

I agree, this business is our baby, and we love it. I remember a time a few years ago, I think it was my birthday and we said, listen, we’re going to have a nice lunch and we’re not going to talk about work. We sat at a bar not dissimilar from this one and we were chatting away with the barman and ordering cocktails. That lasted about 4 minutes before we were looking behind the bar saying “I quite like that spirit bottle because of the shape” then an hour passed and all we’d done was talk about work – we’d failed!

But like you say if you are passionate about what you do then there is no work-life because it’s just life and this has been our life for the last seven years now. So, you know, we’re always talking about work, talking about ways of making it better, we don’t stop. On the flip side, because we’re business owners we can take Fridays off, we can spend quality time with our son when he needs it, and we can do the school run – we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Any advice for a couple exploring whether to go into business together or not?

Make sure you love each other if you really get on each other’s t*ts, don’t ever do business together. It will test your relationship and you have to fully commit to it. But if you do love each other and you want to spend time together and spend every day talking about it, then go for it. I mean, it’s the best thing we’ve ever done. But it’s like having a child, if you’re not completely in love don’t have a child, because that will break your spirit instantly.

Nigel Eastham & Adrian Adiar
SEB HEELEY, CO-FOUNDER AT THE SPIRIT OF MANCHESTER SHOWING ADRIAN ADAIR THEIR DISTILLERY FACTORY. IMAGES © BROOD MAGAZINE

And what do you think is the one key ingredient to a successful family business other than love and passion?

Well, our business motto is ‘f*** it’. And as far as we’re concerned, that’s what we live and die by. When Jen first quit her job, it was ‘f*** it’, let’s do it.

What I mean by ‘f*** it’ is, just be bold in what you do. If you really think it’s worthwhile doing it, then do it. But ultimately, if it was easy everyone would do it. When I first started working on the business my friends would say ‘Why would you bother to do this?’ My old boss was the same, when I got my first still got delivered to my office he told me I was an idiot… he took that back 4 months later!

I think this ‘being bold’ rhetoric just says everything about you. When we were on the panel together at that Northwest Insider event your desire to succeed came across so strongly. Do you mind me asking, where does that come from?

Honestly, it’s a desire not to fail. I always wanted to start my own business growing up, conversely, Jen wasn’t that massively enthused about it and it wasn’t a big driver of hers.

I think it just comes from always wanting to do something new. If you discover something you love, why wouldn’t you put your all into it? Why wouldn’t I want to make a whisky next, why wouldn’t I want to build a new distillery? Once you’ve done one thing, it needs to roll onto the next. For us, the development of our brand isn’t a game plan, it’s a natural progression.

That’s so interesting to hear you say that. At Morson, one of our core values is curiosity. We want our people to know that by being curious, and inquisitive you’re making yourself and your business better, and more successful.

Yeah, exactly. You must always be on the lookout for what’s new, and what’s coming. Two years ago, we didn’t have the ambition to go into whisky but in the next six/seven years it’ll probably become the focus of the whole business. So, you’ve just got to roll with what’s moving, what’s changing, and how your passions change and evolve.

So, whisky is firmly in the pipeline?

Well, I always say, and I stand fast in this, I still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up. And I don’t think I’ll ever know. But I love this business, I love making alcohol – the next ten years will revolve around whisky. We call it a super distillery. It’ll be capable of producing half a million bottles of whisky a year. Compared to Scotland, that’s considered very small. So we would be a cottage industry business to Scotch Whisky and but we’ll be in the top three or four producers of English Whisky. So our ten-year goal is to produce one of the world’s best whiskys and grow internationally with that brand.

The still behind us is a thousand-litre still that can make a million bottles of gin. Our 750-litre whisky still can only make 40,000 bottles. So we need a 15,000 square foot space to make the equivalent amount of whisky to gin. So the focus for the next two to three years is to get a new distillery up and running and fire into production because you’ve got to wait at least three years for it to mature into whisky.

Will it be Manchester’s first whisky?

I mean Macclesfield have a whisky and the guys at Forest Gin, but that’s Cheshire, so yeah, Manchester’s first. But also the best, I want to produce the world’s best whisky, you know, just a small feat…

You’ve got guts and ambition. It’s great. Whilst we’re talking about the future, what would you like your son to follow in your footsteps?

You know what, I just want him to do what makes him happy. Jen and I always talk about how amazing it is to see his personality developing and coming through. He’s four now and in reality, the job he’s most likely to do doesn’t even exist right now. When I think when I was a child, social media didn’t exist now I employ three people in our social media team – a job that didn’t exist 20 years ago.

I’d like him to be in control of his own life, which for me meant running my own business when however hard you work is usually a direct correlation to how much you earn. But money is not the be-all and end-all. Genuinely, I would say, as long as he’s happy, that’s the most important thing.

When we were on the panel, you spoke about legacy. The fact that you wanted to create a business that is still going and growing when your son is older. Is that a driving factor?

Yeah, the way we’ve built our brands is for longevity. It comes back to my old days in property. The reason I went into property was to build a building that outlived me. I wanted my children, and my grandchildren to go and see that building, and say “Granddad built it” and it’s the same thing with our brand. I have no interest in him running this business, he has to go and live his own life, as I did. We’ll always have our family name on the back of every bottle we produce and it’ll be something that he (hopefully) is very proud of. But he doesn’t need to run this business if he doesn’t want to.

So as we’re in the festive season, what does Christmas look like in the Heeley-Wiggins household?

Food, food, and more food. I’ve already written the menu. I wrote it probably six weeks ago. I’m obsessed with food. So is my little boy and there’s not much he doesn’t eat. We tried him a couple of years ago with caviar and he enjoyed it but we can’t afford to keep him eating like that!

We usually have six or seven courses from nine to nine, so it’s a 12-hour eating and drinking fest.

And matching cocktails?

Yes, everything is paired with a cocktail. So we’ve got breakfast paired with a breakfast martini. Then prawns in a cream sauce with a French 75 (a cocktail made of gin, champagne, lemon juice, and sugar), followed by a tomahawk steak and a lovely bottle of wine from where we had our honeymoon in Bordeaux and then cheesecakes, cheeses and hams. Then it’s total regret at about 9:15 pm when you can’t move on the sofa!

It’s really special to see a local couple build something so successful, through pure hard work, dedication and above all love.

Seb and Jen’s passion for their business and brand made me think about a term which describes the polar opposite, one that has made its way into the mainstream this year. First touted on TikTok, back in March, the term ‘Quit Quitting’ has done the rounds with the recruiter and business media, generating plentiful commentary and analysis. Viral videos describe quiet quitting as delivering just what your job description demands and no more. You’re ‘quitting’ the idea of going above and beyond by doing the ‘bare minimum’ – that’s it. Individuals feel disengaged from their roles or they lack the same energy or passion they once had.

Regardless of your employment status – entrepreneur, perm, contract or otherwise – it’s natural to strive for a sense of purpose. People want to understand their role, have a clear career pathway for growth and can see how their skills align with the outcomes that they – and the business they work for – are trying to achieve.

If you’re an employer, we must embrace differences, build digital literacy, re-skill talent, create a culture of ‘we’ not ‘me’ and much more. Together, these solid principles will help to tackle quiet quitting, quiet hiring, great resignation and whatever phrase hits the headlines next. After all, a survey by LinkedIn said that companies with a purposeful mission reap 49% lower attrition rates. And those numbers simply can’t be ignored.

Jen and Seb provide the antidote to quiet quitting, “If you discover something you love, why wouldn’t you put your all into it?” and since 2016 have gone above and beyond to build their business. Their success is a testament to the power of finding purpose.

If you are seeking a new purposeful opportunity or are looking for ways to keep your workforce engaged or attract and retain diverse, multi-generation talent drop me a message at adrain.adair@morson.com

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