27th May 2025
Catherine Reynolds, HR Director at Leonard Curtis, talks to North West Business Insider about the role of culture in business growth
As Leonard Curtis approaches its 30th anniversary, we’ve taken time to reflect on what has truly shaped our success — our people.
Leonard Curtis has had a very organic approach to employee engagement and culture over 30 years, centred around five core values, defining what makes our culture unique. These determine how we behave and what we believe in.
As we continue to grow, the challenge is to make sure we look after this trusted culture and put structures around it that are fit for purpose for the next 30 years.
We are a multi-site business – 30 offices with 320+ employees working across four service areas – so building a strong employer brand must cut across geography and professional / technical skill sets.
Our approach to this has been to value everyone as individuals and empower people to express themselves. To have confidence in who they are and what they’re capable of.
We sum it up as follows:
‘We focus on being the difference. We care about the people we support and strive to achieve the best outcomes for them. And we inspire each other through positivity, collaboration and togetherness. So that, in every interaction, we move forward with purpose’.
When I joined two years ago, we set about bringing this vision alive by creating opportunities to communicate better with our employees.
We introduced several initiatives including more structure around monthly one to one and team meetings, an improved appraisal process, which encourages managers to engage authentically with their employees, and an interactive annual people conference.
We also implemented employee engagement surveys to give employees a voice, which has helped us deliver what people want.
We are steadily improving career pathways, making them more transparent, and this year we are set to launch the Leonard Curtis Learning Hub. We have already recruited a learning and development specialist for this who will look at both soft skills and technical training, as well as first line management training and leadership development.
This year we decided to partner with engagement experts, Best Companies, following our first survey we were delighted to receive their 2* ‘outstanding’ rating – 3* being ‘world class’. We are very proud of this.
We have learnt a lot from the survey results and will strive to continually improve. To achieve a 3* accreditation we plan to build on our ‘Giving Back’ policies, whether this means supporting our local communities, being more environmentally friendly or improving our approach to diversity and inclusion (D & I).
The Leonard Curtis Foundation already supports charitable causes. This is a proactive donation scheme based on recommendations by employees. We will build on this.
To better protect the environment, we have provided employees with reusable water bottles, installed water coolers in offices and launched an electric company car scheme, but we know there is a lot more to do. We plan to develop a robust company-wide strategy and keep communicating on it, encouraging employees to get involved.
On D & I we have established a forum to represent and champion greater diversity in the business – where we have already made progress – and improve the numbers of people from diverse groups having long and successful careers with us.
It is worth noting that the business has gone through a huge period of growth in the last three years – from 245 people at the end of April 2022 to 322 in April 2025. This 32% uplift in workforce has come both organically and through acquisition – with above average UK and industry retention rates.
And it has certainly brought new challenges.
I am pleased to say that throughout we have managed to maintain a strong culture and good employee engagement, which is reflected in the 2* Best Companies accreditation. This is our new benchmark.
As we approach our 30th anniversary in September and with growth showing no sign of slowing down we will continue to invest in the ‘people-led’ structures we need to be successful in the future.