The Industry Club: Engagement, alignment & communication

Our brief

The Industry Club is the creative communication sector’s dedicated recruitment partner and training provider. For over a decade, they’ve been working with some of the biggest names in the creative industry helping them match the right talent to the right company and the right teams.

Their training arm, The Industry School, has been built using their extensive agency experience and incredible industry network.

Melissa Smith, Founder and MD of The Industry Club, approached us towards the end of 2023, having sold 100% of the business to an Employee Ownership Trust. Whilst the employees knew about the sale, and there had been some discussions around employee ownership within the business, Melissa needed some help to align her team, engage them in the process of transitioning and frame the opportunity moving forward.

“Having gone through the process with their own business and working with other EOs, Bella and Harry recognised the importance of aligning and engaging the team before announcing the sale to the wider world.”

Melissa Smith, The Industry Club Founder & MD

In addition, there was a requirement to craft the external communications around the transition which would be shared across industry press and the Club’s network, ensuring a sense of business continuity and reassuring clients. The final piece of the engagement was to write the copy which would be used on the About section of the Club’s new website, defining this new chapter in the business’ 13-year history.

Our approach

Following discovery and onboarding conversations with Melissa, we designed an approach based on the initial brief of alignment and engagement, centred around two facilitated workshops with the whole team.

Our workshops were designed to extract information, engage the team in future thinking and generate content for the copywriting process. Overall, we defined four specific goals for the project:

• Engaging the team to uncover and co-create values & behaviours
• Aligning the team by envisioning the next 5/6 years
• Planning the narrative for announcements and communication
• Copy-writing for website and PR messaging

“Having Bella (previous owner) and Harry (employee owner) onboard ensured a balanced approach for me as the founder and the new owners. Their first-hand experience with employee ownership was invaluable for these workshops and our subsequent communication to clients and candidates.”

Melissa Smith, The Industry Club Founder & MD

Our first workshop centred on engagement, with a specific focus on values and behaviours. We also began conversations around the narrative needed to create the messaging and comms which would announce the transition.

The primary outputs from this first session are a useable set of distinctive values, uncovered and built on by the team, known as “Club Rules”. As values are only useful if they direct a certain way of working, we were keen to include detailed descriptions of each core concept. To ensure that the values can be used we also posed thought-provoking questions to guide decision-making, reinforcing the transition from private to employee ownership.

We also helped the team craft a narrative around the challenges that they faced during the transition, and we used elements of this story to build the copy needed to announce the change to the world, but also to describe the difference that employee ownership makes to the team, the business and their customers.

The second workshop was more operational. We facilitated a working session centred on building a 5/6 year plan which sees them pay off the deferred consideration of the initial sale. This exercise serves multiple purposes: communicating requirements around succession, empowering the team with a fundamental understanding of the operational challenges of the entire business (both recruitment and training) and co-creating a plan which outlines growth for both the business and each individual’s responsibilities.

Finally, we drafted a series of messages which could be used to announce the transition to the world. This initial messaging covers a range of subjects highlighting that business will continue as usual to reassure clients, examining what has been done so far and giving a sense of future plans, and also touching on the subject of succession and the business’s enviable track record of staff retention.

Initial outcomes

Mandy Daniel, The Industry Club’s Finance Manager, says of the process, “It’s been eye-opening to see how employee-owned trusts run, and the work we’ve done has made us really think about who we are, where we want to be and the tools we’ll need along the way. But more than that, it’s made us realise what a great team we are, and I feel very lucky to be a part of that, and I’m excited for the future.”

Zoe Edwards, an ex-Publicis business director, who has run the strategy & senior client services desk for the last 7 years, echoed some of Mandy’s comments, “we’ve had a chance to start to imagine the exciting future ahead of us as an employee-owned business, as well as a chance to reinforce what makes us different as a recruiter in the creative industry.”

“It’s so refreshing to work with experts who genuinely care about the success of employee ownership for the companies they assist. My only regret is not involving them earlier in the initial communication with the team. If you are considering transitioning to employee ownership, I highly recommend getting Salad involved early in the process.”

Melissa Smith, The Industry Club Founder & MD

Empowering engagement

Our EO programme is designed to help you overcome the challenges of communication, alignment and engagement. Whether you’re anticipating going employee-owned, have recently transitioned, or are at a more advanced stage of employee ownership and need specific help, we can help.

Head over to our EO page, or get in touch to learn more about the programme.