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Helping businesses to grow and scale

As a small or medium sized business owner, People 1st will help you to effectively navigate the key people challenges as you scale and grow your business.

Business generally fall into three categories, those that:

  • can’t scale and won’t scale
  • want to scale but can’t scale, meaning they may not have the ability, knowledge or support
  • are natural successes and grow regardless of the support available

If you are a business owner and you are ready to grow and scale, we will help you to:

  • recruit and keep the right talent
  • ensure you have the right culture aligned to your business objectives and values
  • bring the best out of your people through effective leadership

We’ve perfected a people-centred approach that is customer focused and designed to deliver results. By embracing this approach, businesses we work with come away with a clearer vision of their strategy for growth, an awareness of the internal capabilities and capacities needed to grow their business. This includes their own leadership style, and a better understating of the external environment in which they operate.

We help you to create significant value for your business which leads to bigger wins with your customers, clients and people.

If you are looking to tap into the potential of your people and business, our proven expertise in people strategy, leadership and culture development can help you achieve exceptional and long-term business success.

About the Founder

People 1st was founded by Laurel Spring-Layman to offer people support to SME’s. Laurel is passionate about supporting individuals and SME businesses to unlock and develop their full potential.

Laurel holds a Master’s degree in People Development and is a Chartered FCIPD member. She has worked as a HR professional for over 25 years; from large international corporations to small non-profit organisations. Laurel is an experienced career coach, project manager and Insight Strategy Specialist. She has held many volunteer positions spanning over 20 years including Pension Trustee and Secretary, Non-Executive Board Member and counsellor.

We value excellence and collaboration and provide practical solutions that are straight-forward, and people centred. The solutions must work for you, your customers and stakeholders.

What We Do

  • Leadership Development

  • People Strategy

  • Culture

High growth businesses face three key leadership challenges; capacity, capability and culture. If your business is to grow effectively it needs the right people and the right leadership. A shortage of leaders at every level is the biggest challenge to your business sustaining growth, even if you can create client demand.

We provide support to build leaders (or individual competence) and leadership (business capability and capacity) that increases customer and stakeholder confidence in your ability to deliver the right results. We also help business owners develop awareness of their preferred leadership style, build rapport and to bring out the best in all their people.

We provide advice for growing businesses to help you align your business strategy with your people practices and strategies.

Quite often, businesses develop without a well-thought-out people strategy simply because the initial focus is almost exclusively on sales. In reality, the people and business strategies should run side by side from the beginning as a lack of an effective people strategy directly influences profitability. This in turn can impact the ability to attract future funding and investment and the ability to survive and grow.

No matter how great your products, technology or processes, businesses struggle to meet stakeholder needs without the right people and people capabilities to deliver what makes the business unique.

We help you put the right people strategy in place for your business and help you focus your people efforts and people investments where they can make the most impact.

High growth businesses also face the challenge of preserving the positives of their culture as they grow. Culture is generally formed early on by business owners and key employees. But as the business adds new personalities (or locations) it can be a real challenge to incorporate all these individuals and preserve the business culture you may have created.

We help business owners to have a culture of growth that everyone buys into. We also help to ensure your employees are aligned to your business purpose and culture and that they fit the role in which they work.

As a growing business a key challenge has been finding the right people to grow whilst retaining the unique company culture.

Laurel was pivotal in providing the right guidance and support in helping to design a recruitment and growth strategy around building a team with core values that are aligned. I highly recommend Laurel and her team.

  • Rita Field
  • TopLife Coaching and Therapy

Laurel has provided me with insight and understanding on how to be specific in setting goals and reaching my aspirations.  I appreciate her wealth of knowledge in career and personal coaching.

  • Dulcie
  • DF Coaching

Connect

We’ll give you straight-forward and professional advice to help you grow your business. For a free confidential chat, contact us today!

Phone: 0800 774 7400
Email: laurel@people1stgroup.com