Last Friday was EO Day 2025, a celebration of employee ownership businesses and the business model itself. It serves as a reminder of everything that’s great about this adventure that a snowballing number of companies and organisations are on in the UK and around the world.
We were fortunate to begin the festivities a week early this year with the latest instalment of our client Salad’s series of South Coast EO networking events at their office on Poole Quay. It was great to catch up with friends from the EO community locally and further afield, some of whom I’ve not seen since the EOA annual conference last November, or Salad’s previous event in September. Sign up to Salad’s EO newsletter to hear about their next event first.
On Tuesday I joined Sam Moles from Stephens Scown‘s monthly EO Knowledge Share event on Teams. Sam was joined by departing Paradigm Norton CEO, Barry Horner who spoke about his experience of stepping back from a leadership role in the business he founded, as they continue forward on an EO journey. If you’d be interested in attending a future session in this series, please do contact Sam.
On EO Day Eve, many of us reconvened for an event hosted a few doors up on the quay at LUSH‘s offices, hosted by the company, alongside Go Ape and champion of all things EO, Helen Moreton from Boombox Consulting. We heard from each of the aforementioned businesses (Kirsty Barnes and Suzy Hill on LUSH’s Employee Benefit Trust, followed by Ben Davies and Chris Jones on how EO is taking Go Ape to new heights – pun fully intended) as well as Sam Moles on his path to winning ’employee owner of the year’ award 2023.
For EO Day itself, we took the opportunity to launch our Co-owner Charter at Grapevine. I was very honoured to be tasked with writing the first edition of this on behalf of our team, based on responses to the question “what do you value about Grapevine?” (read it in full here).
I also attempted to make the ‘eo’ glasses issued by the Employee Ownership Association which required a nostalgic bit of cutting and sticking. I’m not sure how well my attempt came out, but it’s certainly reflective of EO Day 2025 taking place in the middle of a heatwave this year.
I was recently invited to talk about all things EO on Northumberland University’s Why Small Business Matters podcast. You can listen to the episode here or find it on Apple, Spotify, etc.
Liam Toms 