#ICPODCAST | EP 56 | The Importance of Organisational Culture | April Bembridge from Cooper Parry

Welcome to the Inspiring Change Podcast, where I talk to leaders about internal communications, engagement, leadership, and the role they all play in creating amazing cultures.

One of the misconceptions I think about Cooper Parry as well is that because we have cool offices and because we have unlimited holiday and we have, you know, email curfews and all this other stuff, a lot of people say, "Do you actually make any money? Does anyone actually work hard?" And they do.

Hello there and welcome to this episode of the Inspiring Hearing Change podcast with me, Scott McInnes. I hope you're keeping well. It is February 2021, lockdown 3, the joys. I think, you know, something that struck me the other day, and it was actually the reason that, that I wanted to get this guest on today, was that we all carry, whether we like it or not, we all carry a certain amount of bias in our heads. We all carry a certain amount of, well, this is how I expect things to be, and when they're not like that, my God, that's a bit surprising. And that's exactly what happened with about the company, particularly that I'm the guest from, the guest is from today, because I'd seen this company in a couple of different places. I'd heard about them from a couple of different sources. And it was only when I went onto their website that I went, oh my God, that's just an utter game changer. And I urge you to go while you're listening to this, if you can, Go and have a look at cooperparry.com, C-O-O-P-E-R-P-A-R-R-Y.com, and be blown away because this is a company that is an accounting firm. That's what they do. When you look at the website, you'll see what I mean. And what really drew me to their story was their 100% focus on people, their commitment to people, their commitment to being rebellious and doing things differently and doing it so well that it's won them loads of awards in employee engagement and communications and in lots and lots of other different areas. They're also listed in the top 10 companies to work for in the UK, which is amazing as well. So I'm really pleased that today I'm getting to chat to April Bembridge, who is their Chief People Officer and a partner in Cooper Parry, to talk through some of what they do, why they've done it, and maybe the differences made for the company and for their people and their clients. So April, hello there.

Hi, hi Scott, thanks for having me. You're very welcome.

Listen, I'm I'm really excited because, as I said, I said to you, I think on the phone before we kicked off, you know, going to your website and looking and seeing what you've done, it was like an assault. It was like being assaulted in a good way on the eyes. And, you know, what I'm always keen to understand is, you know, from an organization's perspective, you often see that they put out this front, they have this shop window of the website of, you know, cool, funky, beautiful people doing amazing things and all the right words and all that stuff. But actually, when you get behind the curtain, when you pull those curtains slightly to the side and you look in behind, it's actually nothing like that. The sense that I get is that Cooper Parry actually is perfectly aligned with the, the back end of Cooper Parry is perfectly aligned with what you're showing in the shop window. So I'm really keen to get into a little bit of that over the next kind of 40 minutes or so. So I think first of all, why don't we just kick off? I think people would be interested in just learning maybe a little bit about you and about your role in, in Cooper Parry.

Okay, right. I love the assault thing. Assault in a good way. It makes me smile. I'm going to I'll use that. Yeah, I mean, so yeah, as you said, I'm Chief People Officer at Cooper Parry. I've been there for almost 5 years now. Something that I kind of mentioned to quite a lot of people actually is one of my very first jobs I ever had was in an accountancy firm. So, I left school at 16, wasn't, you know, education wasn't enjoyable for me, and went into the world of work, and that was one of my first jobs, and I hated it. I absolutely hated it. It was everything, you know, you mentioned about the bias, the stereotypical accountancy firm, grey walls, no windows, an underground office, it was like going into a dungeon every day. People weren't particularly exciting and as a 16, 17-year-old, it was not my idea of fun and I left there quite promptly and I made a promise to myself, you know, a vow almost, that I would never ever step foot inside an accountancy firm again. So I always find it quite amusing that that's where I've been for the past 5 years. And definitely it's because Cooper Parry is different, which I can talk a bit more about in a bit. But yeah, for me, that, you know, I kind of realized quite early on that I wanted to— I didn't know that it was about career or didn't know that it was about work, but I knew that I wanted to be around like-minded people. I was bullied quite a lot at school. And so this kind of feeling of being treated fairly, equally, kindly, which is something, you know, a word you don't hear a lot in business necessarily, was really important to me. I wanted to feel like I belonged. I belonged somewhere. And when I started going into the world of work, I straight away felt like I belonged. I was around adults that spoke to me like a grown-up, that treated me like, you know, an equal. And that was it really. You know, I had a few different jobs and fell in, kind of fell into HR by accident later down the line. But that really, I think, instilled a value in me around don't underestimate working with people that are nice. Don't underestimate working with people that you actually genuinely like, and do something that you love. Don't do something because someone tells you that it's a path you've got to go down. So yeah, I kind of stick to that now in terms of the ethos of what I try to drive at Cooper Parry as well.

Brilliant, brilliant. And I remember when I left AIB to set up Inspiring Change back in 2017, I'd literally just come from a conference where one of the speakers had said, "Hell on earth would be to meet the person that you could have been." Interesting. And I think that when you think about that, you know, exactly to your point, do a job you love, work with people you like, because we only get one crack at it. And why do something we don't like doing?

100%. You know, I say it to people all the time. I don't know, people that work at Cooper Parry, you know, if they're not enjoying it, if they're realizing that they've taken, you know, career path that isn't right for them, I'll never ever, you know, feel bad about anyone leaving if they're leaving because they're going to do something that they they love and are passionate about and is going to make them happy. You're right, we get one shot at this. You know, we're all going out the same way. What happens after that is up for debate, I guess, for everybody. But, you know, we get one chance and why be miserable? Or, you know, why not be as happy as you can be and make the best of it? So, yeah, completely massive advocate of that.

Yeah, great. Let's talk a little bit about culture because it strikes me that, you know, having spoken to you a couple of times, having looked at the website, having listened to a lot of the films are up on the website and everything is people-driven. It's all stories, it's all staff up there, it's all people having a bit of crack and a bit of fun. And it strikes me that the culture at Cooper Parry is really, really important to your, to your success, critical to your success. I just wonder what culture means to you and how you define that.

Yeah, great. I mean, it's a great question and it really is critical to our success, you know, and that, that isn't just me as the head of people role saying that. Our CEO, Ade, huge believer in that, you know, it's why I joined Cooper Parry because he, you know, he's, we know, we say we're quite simple people with a real simple concept that if we build a culture that people want to work in, that people feel they can be their true selves, that they can thrive in, be their best, play to their strengths every single day, then you're going to attract and you're going to keep the very best people out there. Like, it's that simple. And you attract and keep the best people, they are happy and they're engaged and feel developed, you know, they are going to deliver an amazing experience for our clients because they'll feel that. They'll feel that in every interaction that they have. And you know, you get happy clients, well, guess what? They tell other people that they're happy and they stay with you and then your business grows. And so that, it has to be at the start of everything else. And I guess, how would I define culture? I think it's hard to define it in any one single way, but for us, it's kind of like about a shared set of values, a shared set of purpose. So, you know, we don't want a business full of robots that are all the same, that all look the same, talk the same, walk the same, think the same, but we do want there to be a common thread of shared values. And that for me is the bit that's important. So, you know, people being able to be individuals, having diverse workforce is really important. And I think sometimes people confuse that, that if you build a culture, it means that you want everybody to be exactly the same. And that isn't what it means to me, isn't what it means to us. So, yeah, that's how I would define it, a shared set of values, a shared purpose. And there's a ton of research around, well, not just engagement, but culture as well. So, I don't know if you're familiar with the studies around Blue Zones, countries that have like the most happiest, the happiest people in the world. And there's a tiny village on the island of Okinawa where they're supposed to be like the happiest people in the world. And all these studies show that it's because they've got a sense of purpose, you know, sense of belonging. They all have a role to play in that community. So that is their culture. And for me, we're kind of trying to create like our own Okinawa in, I don't know if I'm saying Okinawa right, but we're trying to create our own version of that in Cooper Parry where everybody like finds that ikigai, that sweet spot, of where the thing that they love doing and the thing that they're really good at and they get paid for it, put that all together, that's the ikigai. And, you know, there's obviously loads of books around there and it's kind of a bit of a buzzword right now, but all of those things encompass culture for me.

Yeah, but it is true. It is about that, you know, what we're good at, what we get paid for, what we can do, what people look for in us, you know. And I think when you hit that sweet spot, it's an amazing thing. To be able to feel, actually, because I think that feelings isn't something that we're often very good at in business either, particularly from a leadership perspective. You know, well, tell me how that made you feel. And they'd rather run, you know, they'd rather run through a wall than perhaps tell you. That's not the case perhaps in Cooper Parry. I guess to play devil's advocate for a second, you know, if I think about my accountants or I think about other accounting firms that I've dealt with, what I want them to do is do the numbers and do them really well and do them in a way that really work for me and my business and kind of make sure that I'm not paying more than I should be paying and that I'm claiming the things that I should be claiming. You could argue that that's pretty black and white. You know, why do we need all the color? And I think again, listeners, if you go and have a look at the website, you'll get the reference. Why do we need all that color? Why can't it just be black and white?

Yeah, I mean, we definitely do all of that other stuff as well, you know, that we've got a great team of people and performance is really, really important to us as well, so, you know, we measure everybody against performance and values in equal importance, so we tend to kind of, you know, where some businesses do their end-of-year process around performance and potential, ours is performance and values. We still have the potential conversation, but it's a very separate conversation. It's what matters first is are you being the best at the current job that you're doing and are you enjoying it and are you thriving in it? But to get to answer your question about that, because we're dealing with human beings, so yeah, we want to deliver an exceptional service where we give you the facts and we give you the figures and we give the information and we help you, you know, help you and your business play to your strengths as well. But the relationship that we have with our people internally we need to have that kind of relationship with our clients and customers as well. So yeah, we do, as I said, we're dealing with human beings, you know, we're not robots. So we can do all that transactional stuff and that's great, but imagine if your accountant is actually saying to you, what are your hopes and your dreams? Where do you want to take your business? What do you want to achieve out of life? What's your personal ambition for life? You know, what do you want to be doing in 10 years? Do you want to be sat on a boat on an island fishing and chilling out? Then let us help you, advise you in a way that allows you to meet those goals. So it's not just about dealing with the present or being reactionary, we want to help paint that future for you as well, and that's a big part of our, so our relationship partners that work closely with our clients, they spend a lot of time really getting to understand the business. You know, our sales team, similar, when we go in and do a pitch, we don't do a pitch based on we're great auditors and we can, you know, account accurately. That's a given. What we pitch on is how can we help you, how can we help your business, how can we help you as a business owner. That's which is why kind of working with fast-growing entrepreneurial-minded businesses is kind of our niche market. So size isn't important, but if you own a business that wants to grow, that wants to evolve, that wants to change, that's forward-thinking, then we're the right accountancy firm for you. If you're not, then we're probably not right for you. And we're kind of okay with that.

Brilliant. And I think the one thing that really strikes me as well about Cooper Parry is that you're, you're not traditionally London-based.

No.

You're based in the Midlands. You've got an office in London. And I think what's wonderful about that is that all we ever hear, you know, I'm obviously based in Ireland, you're based in the UK, what we hear a lot in the UK, and this really, really gets the goat of my friends that live up around Manchester and in the north, the brain drain down to London. Everybody goes to London, that's the place to be, that's the place you get your stripes. You know, if you haven't done time in London, you haven't worked. It strikes me that you're kind of breaking that mold a wee bit because you're— you started in the, in the Midlands, and that surely has got to be the way that you're now going about attracting and retaining staff, means that actually maybe that brain drain from your perspective is starting to stop. You're asking them to stay with you in the Midlands.

Yeah, I mean, definitely. So, you know, a number of our senior partners, and Ada mentioned before, the CEO, a lot of them joined from, you know, Big Four accountancy firms where it was all very London-centric, and they were getting quite frustrated with the fact that it was all about London. And that's, you know, London's a great city, not to do London down, but it being Midlands-based as they were, all the decisions were being made in London, and the focus was on how London operates and how a business thinks, has to operate, has to survive in the Midlands or in the Northwest or the Northeast is completely different to London, you know, it's its own country almost, London, isn't it? So that was a big part of why they moved to Cooper Parry at the time, which was starting to become— it was very traditional still back then, when Abe joined, but he sensed that there was a, you know, a changing, a desire for change, and didn't want to be part of that kind of of London politics anymore. So yeah, what we found is, certainly in the 5 years I've been at Cooper Parry, there have been periods where we've talked about, do we need to have a bigger London presence in order to grow? Particularly when we were working with clients from overseas, you know, they see, oh, if you've not got an office in London, you're not really a UK business, which again is, you know, an education piece. So we did take some space in London and actually, We didn't have our own office, but we took some WeWork space and started to build a presence down there. And however, since COVID we have, well, we're not in our offices anywhere. We're pretty much all working from home, but the London WeWork we came out of completely. We haven't seen any fallout off the back of that. So what we've tried to do actually is hire in really talented people that have a following already, or that have got a really great reputation in the market and we've, you know, it's that old kind of saying of people follow people, people buy people and that's what's been critical for us so it's no longer about location and now with everybody working remotely and realising that it doesn't matter where you are in the world then that becomes less and less of an issue so yeah, I hope we are breaking the mould with that and you know, similarly with other firms, you know, we've got lots of firms we're friends with in Manchester and surrounding areas, Leeds, etc., that are doing really well for that very reason, that they often— you often find they are a little bit different and you're not your typical kind of blue-gray accountancy firm.

Brilliant, brilliant. At Inspiring Change, we help our clients to implement sustainable change and drive business performance by putting their people first. We do that through a focus on strategic internal communications, employee engagement, and leadership consultancy. If you're struggling with change or getting your people aligned behind your purpose, vision, or strategy, then get in touch. Simply visit our website at www.inspiringchange.ie for more. I was looking through, listeners, go and have a look on the website. If you have a little search around, you'll find the Cooper Parry Culture Playbook, which is very interesting and something that I first saw being done by Zappos. Really famously over in Las Vegas, which I'm guessing maybe is where the idea came from, given the nodding I'm seeing from April. Really interesting. I'm looking back at Jeremy Bowler, your chairman, and the address that he put in your most recent playbook. And I presume he was one of the people that was there back at the start of Cooper Parry. And he's been on that journey. He starts his piece with, you wouldn't recognize the business that I joined in 1971. He then follows up with, "I wouldn't want to work there now." And he finishes his address with, "We've all built this. It will get even better." And that sense of just keeping going, of knowing that even though we've built something that isn't that, you know, we've built something which is this, which is amazing, but actually we've got something even better that we can build in the future is really, really motivating for people. And I think that whole idea of motivation brings me on really nicely to your purpose. And when I look through the website, you know, to disrupt lead and make life count. I love that. It's brilliant. And I think it's not even just about, you know, for me, it's really interesting, actually, it's back to your point about, you know, a culture is not about creating a box that everyone has to fit into. And if you don't fit your square peg into the square hole, you don't work, you know, you're not gonna work here, you're not gonna fit in here. It's about, you know, for me, culture is about creating a flexible framework, about creating something where people are, a field that people can arrive into and they can be themselves and they can bring what they bring to the organization, and you can celebrate that difference and bring the benefit of that in. You know, you talk a lot on the site about diversity and inclusion, but that whole idea of making life count, that's for your clients, it's for each other, it's for me as a person, it's for everyone. So it's really, really nice. I just wonder what practically you do to bring that purpose to life every day. How do you celebrate it? What are some of the things that you're doing?

Yeah, it's, um,— So, I love that, yeah. I often talk about freedom within a framework at Cooper Parry. So, you know, we try not to kind of have too many, like, policies that are pages and pages long. You know, we have some direction, and then we kind of give people the freedom to deliver in the way that they see fit. And it's similar with things like our objective setting. You know, hopefully we're clear to everybody on what the expectation is, but how you get there is completely up to you, so long as the output is what's been agreed. In terms of the Disrupt, Lead, Make Life Count, yeah, it is really kind of at the core. So the disrupt stuff, hopefully that starts to become quite evident, as you say, when you look at the website. The culture came first, the website came second, and we wanted to give people a sense of when they go into the website, that it's almost like diving into our office or diving into our culture. So if you come to our offices, you'll see that there's a very similar theme in terms of there's a lot of color, It doesn't look like an accountancy firm at all, we don't have a reception area, we have an open kind of concierge area where somebody will greet you, a big coffee bar, it's kind of got that very sort of hotel lobby type feel to it, you know, like a Soho House kind of vibe, and part of that was as well because we found increasingly that people didn't want to work in office spaces either, you know, actually people were starting to gravitate towards work— work going and working in a coffee shop, So we were like, well, we still want to maintain that community feel and that buzz and that excitement of people being around, so let's bring the coffee shop to Cooper Parry. So that was quite disruptive. We have unlimited holiday, which everybody gasps at when we tell them that, and brings up lots of questions about how do you manage it? How do you monitor it? How do you trust people? So we have a huge amount of trust for our people to, again, it's about outputs and not hours worked. So that was very disruptive. We were one of the first sort of accountancy firms, as far as I'm aware, to not have a managing partner that had clients. So it's less common now, but very typical. And in the US, it's really typical still that, you know, the managing partner, the kind of CEO equivalent, would have the largest book of clients, you know, the biggest fees, and, you know, We have a number of non-chargeable partners. So obviously I'm a partner, I'm non-chargeable. Ade, as our CEO, doesn't have any clients. He's there to run the business. And it was actually Jeremy, Jeremy Bowler, who you mentioned, was the first CEO to move to that model. So he's pretty, you know, Jeremy is a great guy, pretty groundbreaking, you know, in his own rights. So yeah, there's a lot of things we do, I think, that disrupt the marketplace and are different to, accountants. We want to kind of not just be disruptive for an accountancy firm though, we want to just be disruptive in general, and I know that's a bit of a contentious word for some, you know, is being disruptive good or not, but for me what that means is it's kind of rippling the ground and shaking things up a bit so that we can create positive change in the world without sounding too hammy about it. And then in terms of lead, yeah, I guess similar, you know, we are leading in our marketplace, so we've got the largest number of privately owned medium-sized businesses in the Midlands now, and there's always been a really clear kind of line of direction with that. So we were East Midlands originally, 3 small sort of colloquial East Midlands offices: Derby, Leicester, Nottingham. We then created a super office in the East Midlands, which is our Skyview office now at East Midlands Airport, and once we kind of hit the target for that office to become the— have the most independently owned businesses. We then said, okay, let's go to the West Midlands and kind of stretch that out. So that's kind of how we've operated, is we focus really hard on, on one goal, kind of push, push, push, hopefully, you know, get to the point we smash it and then expand. Um, so we, we, we think we're kind of leading, leading in the market in that way. And then the Make Life Count bit for me is the bit that's really kind of gets me. Um, it's because it is, like we've said before, you get one chance at life and you know you might think that working for an accountancy firm, how can people feel emotionally connected to that? You know, for all the reasons you said before, well they're there to do the numbers and to give the facts and figures, what's so heartwarming about that? And so we do want to make a real conscious effort to actually have a positive impact on society, and to make life count. Like I said, make life count for our people whilst they're with us, make life count for our clients, and make life count for our communities as well. So in terms of our people, there's a ton of stuff we do. So yeah, we focus on strengths, we're a big strengths-based organisation, so the Gallup Strengths Framework we use for that. So all of our managers are trained on how to have strengths-based conversations, how to ask those kinds of questions at interview, like, you know, What are your dreams? What are your hopes? What did you love doing when you were a kid? You know, to try and get under the skin of what really makes people tick. And, you know, lots of things we do which aren't unusual, you know, loads of businesses do them. So we work with local charities in our community, volunteer time. That was something that we actually found when we did the Best Companies survey, that giving back was an area a few years back that we didn't seem to be scoring that highly in. And we did loads of fundraising we kind of couldn't figure out why people were scoring as low, so we asked people and what we found was, yeah, it's great to raise money, but actually what I really want to do is give my time to a cause that's important to me. So that was like, right, okay, get that. So we focus a lot more on allowing people the time to be able to do that, whether it's supporting a school trip or going and, you know, building a community garden, whatever it might be. We have a CP bucket list that everybody can put on the bucket list the things that they, you know, their dreams and the things they want to do. And we've kind of randomly selected somebody off the bucket list and then made that a reality. So, you know, and things from always wanted to have afternoon tea at the Ritz to I want to go to Cambodia and cycle Vietnam to Cambodia. So we've had a group of people that did that. So we found, what we found through the bucket list actually is that there are lots of people that have similar dreams, similar passions. So we try to kind of then connect them together. So that they're interacting with people that they wouldn't normally have any reason to interact with, but there's a personal aspect.

And you would never have known that had you not have asked the question.

No, no. And people don't ask the question, do they? So that was, you know, amazing. And some of the things that people put on their bucket lists, you know, one of my dreams is to have a donkey one day. And I have in my purse a picture of a random donkey that just reminds me every time I go to buy something that I perhaps don't really need, I go, okay, is that going to get me donkey or not. And then, you know, sometimes it works. But yeah, it's getting to know people on a human level and what drives them and what motivates them. And so we try to then— so we built a program called the Heartbeat Program, which— and our Wellbeing Wheel, which is linked to the Gallup Wellbeing Wheel. So all those things that the studies show are important: purpose, community, having social wellbeing, financial wellbeing. And then we kind of built a program around that, and we're now just in the infancy of starting to— how can we mirror some of those activities for our clients as well? So where can we get them involved in some of these activities? And then the final bit around Make Life Count is we've just started going for B Corp accreditation, and that's really something I'm hugely passionate about. We're literally very, very early on in our journey, we're at evaluation stage for that, and I was on a call earlier this week with a group of other businesses that are combination, some of them B Corp already, some of them going through the process. And you know, that commitment and passion to building a more sustainable business, being a business that's force for good, is something that really will tip the edge for us on the Make Life Count aspect.

Yeah, brilliant. God, there was so much in there.

I know, sorry, I rambled.

No, that was— no, you know what, that was super. There was so much amazing stuff in there. You know, a couple of things that spring to mind comes to mind for me is that organizations have to work. You know, I think if I've said this to clients before, that when you work in the life sciences, you work with people and you work in medical, you work in healthcare, you work in something like that, where there's actually a completely direct connection between me and helping another human being, that's, that's kind of easy from a, from a, from a purpose perspective, right? When you work in something like professional services, whether you're a lawyer or an accountant or, you know, a communications consultant, that can be a little bit harder. And we need— organizations have to work, and you've worked really hard to create that red thread for people, to create that link between what we do. And it's not about doing the tax, and it's not about doing a spreadsheet, and it's not about delivering, you know, a set of accounts. Yes, that's what we do, but why we do it is to help our clients get the most from their lives, to help them, to use your words, achieve their hopes and dreams. The answer to, do you want to be on an island fishing with a boat, is yes.

Okay.

For me, definitely within 10 years. So I'll be ringing you separately to find out how exactly it is that I do that. That's a big one. The other one that really struck me was your volunteering one. And I think that lots of organizations, and there are a few things in there that really struck me actually, a lot of organizations think, let's get a team together and let's go out and paint some classrooms. Let's go out and build a community garden. Let's go out and do, you know, clear rubbish out of a canal. Let's go and do all that stuff. Let's do work for the Irish Cancer Society. Let's have a charity of the year. And I remember back in my AIB days, I was chatting to the HR director and we went down that route of, let's pick a charity. And I said, well, you know, okay, let's take, for example, breast cancer. That's an awful thing that happens to people. But if I've never been touched by that, if my family has never been touched by that, if a partner or a wife or a whatever has never been touched by that, it's going to connect less with me. So are we not better off just saying to people, take 3 days a year, 4 days, 6 days, 10 days a year, whatever it is, and go off and do something amazing for an organization that touches you? And I often said, use your skills. Don't go out and pick up a paintbrush because you're probably— if you're anything like me, you're a rubbish painter. Like, but I can go out and help an organization put together a really good comms plan, can help with leader development upskill, which is way more rewarding for me than painting a classroom or a wall or digging a flower bed. So it is definitely about finding that balance. And of course, the thing that you said there, which is very key, and of course back to employee voice, a key cornerstone of engagement is asking people. We didn't know what it was, why we were scoring so low until we asked people. Critically important. So there's a huge amount of stuff there that I think was really useful, really, really insightful and interesting. I want to move on briefly to values, because I love your first value, be nice. I love that. And if we could just have a little bit more of that in the world, wouldn't it be a nicer place to be? Your other ones, play all in, keep learning, and be brave. 4 values, Nice and simple. Talk to me a little bit, maybe pick one of them, the one that resonates maybe most with you, and maybe bring it to life for me with a couple of stories of how that really comes to life in Cooper Parry.

Yeah, so we've got 5 actually.

Was there 5? Sorry.

That's okay. So, I mean, I guess going back to your point around, you know, your own experience of, I think often what happens with values is they're selected by a leadership team, they're posted on a wall so everyone can see them, They may be on an end-of-year piece of paper that you get out of the drawer once a year and have a look at, and that's kind of it. So we, it was probably about 3 years ago now, I think, we'd had different values before and we decided that we'd probably moved, we changed and we'd have grown and we'd evolved quite a lot as a business and it was time to kind of revisit them. So we did a huge piece of work with a massive number of people, not every single person at Group Private, various different groups together. I think it was probably about 20 different groups in the end. And the aide and I met with them. We did an exercise where we kind of said, you know, if, you know, tell us who in Cooper Parry currently like embodies everything that we were about. Who is it that you aspire to be more like? Who is it that if, if, if ever, if more people were like them, that we would have world domination, I think was the question that we used. And, you know, some names started to come up and we kind of flip charted them around the room. And there were some common themes of names coming up, as you can imagine. And then we kind of asked the next question was, what is it about these people, why? And so, you know, a ton of words went up again on the walls, and we did this with every group. Took a long time, took us about 8 months in total to kind of go through this whole process. And we then started to see common themes of words, so we kind of pulled these together, went back to the groups and said, right, you've all kind of said this, what do you actually mean by that? Can we get it down to one word or phrase? And we came up with more or less the values that you've just mentioned there, a couple of slight tweaks around words, the actual— excuse me, that's my dog, one of them— and we then went out to the whole business and said, this is what we've done, this is what we've seen, what do you think? Give us some feedback. And we had some a more disruptive language actually around 'be nice.' Originally we had 'don't be a dick,' which came up, and a lot of people felt really strongly that that was right, and then we had others that felt that that wasn't the right language to use. So this stuff has to appeal to everybody, it has to— everybody has to buy into it. So we landed on the 5 that we've got now, and we really wanted them to kind of to live and to stick, so we created something called CP Housing houses, which is a bit like Harry Potter houses. And so when you're at school, I was in a school, a house when I was at school that you did sports with and other things you got points for. So everybody at Cooper Parry was assigned a house and the houses were named after the values. And then when you join Cooper Parry, you're assigned a house. We don't have a sorting hat or anything like that. It just randomly, randomly falls.

You know what? I'm really surprised that you don't have a sorting hat.

No, we need to work on that, don't we?

You totally should have.

Yeah, some kind of sorting thing. But everyone gets a hood, so we get house hoodies with the house name on the back. So when we— then we do a number of challenges throughout the year. So we have, well, normally big football tournament, houses play against each other. We do fundraising challenges, we do fitness challenges, we do business idea kind of challenges. They get points and at the end of the year, so we've named them after 4 of the houses and then the In It Together is the trophy that they get at the end. Of the year, the winning house. There's no like big prize, it's just the pride of your house winning. It gets quite competitive, but what it's done is it's really made them stick in people's minds. So rather than being plastered on the wall, you know, people wear their hoodies with pride, and you know, people can name the values because of that. To pick one for me, I think personally one that resonates with me is Keep Learning. I love learning, absolutely, and I found as I get older, I I'm almost addicted to it. So, and that's in lots of ways, whether it's, you know, attending a roundtable and just hearing what other people have got to say or doing an actual course. I love it and it's a big, yes, huge part of Cooper Parry is that keep learning. It isn't just about doing a professional qualification or doing a course, it's how are you growing as a human being. And so we try to kind of help people to understand that Yes, saying that you've done all these workshops, that, you know, that isn't what learning is about. Learning is about you understand, becoming more self-aware as a person. That, yeah, they all resonate for me. Be brave is another one. But yeah, keep learning is the one that I think I'm really passionate about.

Yeah, brilliant, brilliant. And I wonder if you have an organization like yours, where the values are so fundamentally important to your culture, where they underpin it so strongly, where it's tied in really closely to your performance management process and your objective setting and all that good stuff. What happens when somebody does something that isn't in line with the values or is anti-values, where they're not being nice, where they're not being brave, where they're not applying any of the learning?

What—

has that happened? Have you had to deal with situations like that? And how does that work?

Yeah, no, we have. You know, we try to be as thorough as we can in our hiring process. It's one of the things for us that's fundamentally important to get right, so spend a lot of time on the hiring, make sure the process is thorough, ask questions around strengths, around values, but you don't get it right every time and, you know, certainly haven't cracked any of this stuff, you know, we're still learning and figuring it out as we go along, but yeah, it is, it's really, you know, so one of the misconceptions I think about Cooper Parry as well is that because we have call offices, and because we have unlimited holiday and we have email curfews and all this other stuff, that a lot of people say, "Do you actually make any money? Does anyone actually work hard?" And they do. They work so hard. Their performance is something that we measure really closely. We tackle performance if people aren't performing quickly. With performance, it's definitely always from more of a position of support. So, you know, why are they not is there more that we can do to help? With values, we take a much harder line. So if somebody isn't living the values, then we call that out pretty quickly and we have an honest conversation with someone about, perhaps this isn't the right place for you. And sometimes those conversations go well and sometimes they don't go so well, you know, that's the way it is. But no, we don't, what we're finding increasingly as well is that because the values are so, ingrained that other people will call it out. So it doesn't necessarily take a full, you know, we don't wait till the end of the year in an end-of-year review before that conversation happens. It happens as soon as those behaviours and values aren't lived. And so you find it's kind of self-policing. You know, one of the biggest bits of feedback we had as well around engagement was when people felt like hardworking people felt like they were having to carry other people that weren't pulling their weight, whether that's in performance or the values. And so now mostly people do start to call that out. And yeah, I think the more that you tackle that quickly, the deeper that becomes ingrained because people realize that, "If I'm not living the values here, I'm not gonna stick around." And you know what, that's okay. You know, if someone doesn't believe in our values, as I said before, culture for me is about shared values, not being a robot. So, you can have a voice, you can have a different opinion, you can challenge, but it's about doing that in the right way. Doing it, be nice while you do it. Don't be mean to people. Be brave and speak up, but don't do it in the wrong way. Do it with the best interests of being in it together. So, I think so long as you kind of take all those values hand in hand,, then you can't really go wrong. But yeah, they are, we do call it out if people aren't living the values.

I love that it's not you, and it's not Aid, and it's not necessarily one of the other partners, that it's people on the floor, through the organization, self-policing. And why is that? Well, it's because they feel they work in a trusted environment, where they're empowered, where they do all believe, where they'll get backup and support from their other colleagues. And that's fantastic. And that very much sounds like is, is tested testament to what you've built in Cooper Parry. Last question, just conscious of time. Why is every company in the world not doing what you do? Because it seems like an absolute no-brainer. Why do some companies stand back and go, oh no, no, we like the gray walls, we don't like having windows, we'd prefer to be underground crunching numbers on number-crunching machines. Why is everyone not doing this, do you think?

I mean, My view is, I think they're mad not to, because you get so much back in return from creating a culture where people do thrive and where people can bring their true selves to work. But I guess, you know, we're all unique, different things drive different people. Maybe for some people, actually, they get a lot of enjoyment about looking at a grey wall and sat crunching numbers. And you know what? If they do, that's absolutely fine. I hope they're happy. And, you know, who are we to 'Who are we as Cooper Parry, or who am I to dictate how people should run their business or live their lives?' Yeah, I think they're mad, because I feel strongly about it myself, and I see the positive impact it has. You know, our business has been doing really well financially, and I don't think that that's any coincidence in terms of the culture that we're creating. You know, as I said before, we build a great culture, great people will come and stay, we'll give our clients great service, we'll have business success. That for me is, is a very, very simple formula, um, and I don't know, I don't know why people don't do it. But you know, the world would be a very dull place if we were all the same.

Based on that very simple formula, and it would indeed be a very boring place if you were all the same, I think we'll leave it there. April, thanks. Listen, that's been amazing. What a really interesting conversation with some fantastic insights and ideas that I think that listeners pick up and run with them. And I do urge you, go and have a look at their website. There's tons of really good content on there. So go and have a look. But for the time being, April, thanks so much. I've really, really, really enjoyed the chat.

No, likewise. Thanks, Scott.

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