Impact Curious

Patrick Andrews was a corporate lawyer opening stores in China in 1999 when a colleague pointed out the family businesses lining the street and said “these are the people we're going to put out of business.”

He's spent twenty-five years since asking why we organise companies the way we do. 

He joins Ed Ferris and Emily Monsell-Holden to explain shareholder primacy in plain terms, why he thinks shareholders hold power without responsibility, and what the alternatives actually look like: trust ownership in Denmark, steward ownership behind Bosch and Novo Nordisk, and Haier in China, which employs around 100,000 people in units of no more than fifty. 

He also names the two mistakes he sees founders make most often, both of them about control. Patrick is a lawyer, author of The Incomplete Circle and co-founder of the non-profit Yoak. 

Part two of two.

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Impact Curious is hosted by Ed Ferris and Emily Monsell-Holden of The Impact Apothecary, the anti-consultancy for purpose-led leaders, based in Winchester. Every topic runs across two episodes: one where Ed and Emily work out what they know and what they don't, and one where they bring in an expert to fill in the blanks.  

Get in touch at [email protected] or find Ed and Emily on LinkedIn, where you can vote on the questions we ask our next guest.

Why does UK business run in three-month blocks? Ed Ferris and Emily Monsell-Holden take on the structures we've all inherited without examining. Ed, who took over his father's retail business at 23 and eventually led a group employing close to a thousand people, describes the moment a Rolex presentation about a fifty-year plan made him question everything about quarterly reporting. 

Emily, who spent many years leading brand and marketing in-house before going out on her own, challenges the assumption that entrepreneurial success means grow, raise, exit, burn out. 

They discuss who actually benefits from a business's success, why setting one up in the UK still feels slow and daunting, and what Ed's father said when asked how he knew he'd made it. The answer stopped Ed in his tracks. 

Part one of two.

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Impact Curious is hosted by Ed Ferris and Emily Monsell-Holden of The Impact Apothecary, the anti-consultancy for purpose-led leaders, based in Winchester. Every topic runs across two episodes: one where Ed and Emily work out what they know and what they don't, and one where they bring in an expert to fill in the blanks.  

Get in touch at [email protected] or find Ed and Emily on LinkedIn, where you can vote on the questions we ask our next guest.

Wycliffe Sande started working in coffee in Uganda at eight years old. He joins Ed Ferris and Emily Monsell-Holden to explain why he's spent years championing specialty robusta, the coffee that makes up a large share of world production and the overwhelming majority of Uganda's, and which the industry has historically used as a filler and never talked about. 

When he told farmers he wanted to take their coffee international, they told him it wasn't possible, because nobody like him had ever done it. Now Blue Turaco Coffee is stocked in Waitrose, Tesco, Ocado and Co-op, and every pack funds two school meals.

Part two of two.

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Impact Curious is hosted by Ed Ferris and Emily Monsell-Holden of The Impact Apothecary, the anti-consultancy for purpose-led leaders, based in Winchester. Every topic runs across two episodes: one where Ed and Emily work out what they know and what they don't, and one where they bring in an expert to fill in the blanks.  

Get in touch at [email protected] or find Ed and Emily on LinkedIn, where you can vote on the questions we ask our next guest.

When Emily Monsell-Holden worked at Cafedirect, the big brands were running purpose campaigns about schools and hospitals, the things that photograph well. Ask the smallholder coffee growers what they actually needed and the answers were flood defences, education and help with bookkeeping. Unglamorous, and completely invisible from a marketing department. 

That gap is the subject of this episode: what changes when a business is built by someone who has lived the problem. 

Ed Ferris brings things into perspective from the customer's side, like the hotel in Cornwall run by three sisters who'd grown up in the house, where the story didn’t feel like marketing, because it was simply true. 

They're realistic about the limits, including the gap between what consumers say about purpose and what they do standing in a supermarket aisle at the end of a long day. 

Part one of two.

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Impact Curious is hosted by Ed Ferris and Emily Monsell-Holden of The Impact Apothecary, the anti-consultancy for purpose-led leaders, based in Winchester. Every topic runs across two episodes: one where Ed and Emily work out what they know and what they don't, and one where they bring in an expert to fill in the blanks.  

Get in touch at [email protected] or find Ed and Emily on LinkedIn, where you can vote on the questions we ask our next guest.

Kat Thackray's diagnosis is sharper than most. Organisations put a group of people who've never worked together into a room, leave the roles undefined, hand them a difficult problem and expect it to solve itself. 

She joins Ed Ferris and Emily Monsell-Holden to talk about psychological safety, about why two colleagues may have genuinely different bars for what counts as evidence, and about boundary spanners – the people who translate between the part of an organisation that wants change and the part whose job is to keep things stable. 

Kat is founder of People Equals Purpose. 

Part two of two.

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Impact Curious is hosted by Ed Ferris and Emily Monsell-Holden of The Impact Apothecary, the anti-consultancy for purpose-led leaders, based in Winchester. Every topic runs across two episodes: one where Ed and Emily work out what they know and what they don't, and one where they bring in an expert to fill in the blanks.  

Get in touch at [email protected] or find Ed and Emily on LinkedIn, where you can vote on the questions we ask our next guest.

Emily Monsell-Holden thinks we treat change as one thing when it's actually three: generating ideas, choosing the right ones, and implementing them. 

Each is hard, most organisations are only good at one, and having spent years driving change inside businesses she has a clear view of how much energy gets wasted in the gaps. 

Ed Ferris, who built and led teams in a business employing close to a thousand people, brings up the problem with most team dynamics: he describes a company where four of the five people were natural dreamers, with brilliant ideas pouring out and nobody to make any of them happen. 

Part one of two.

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Impact Curious is hosted by Ed Ferris and Emily Monsell-Holden of The Impact Apothecary, the anti-consultancy for purpose-led leaders, based in Winchester. Every topic runs across two episodes: one where Ed and Emily work out what they know and what they don't, and one where they bring in an expert to fill in the blanks.  

Get in touch at [email protected] or find Ed and Emily on LinkedIn, where you can vote on the questions we ask our next guest.

Elliot Morrow used to be the person you got referred to for social media help. Now he turns those referrals down. 

He joins Ed Ferris and Emily Monsell-Holden to make the case that we're at ‘late-stage social media’, where the original mission has been squeezed out and attention is the only product. 

On going viral he's blunt: nobody can predict it, anyone claiming they can engineer it is lying, and a few hundred thousand views from people with no interest in your business converts to almost nothing measurable. 

His agency has never won a single client through social media in three and a half years of trading. His alternative isn't complicated, it's just harder: find out who your customers actually are, work out where they genuinely spend their attention, and build human relationships. 

Elliot is founder of Bon Creative. 

Part two of two.

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Impact Curious is hosted by Ed Ferris and Emily Monsell-Holden of The Impact Apothecary, the anti-consultancy for purpose-led leaders, based in Winchester. Every topic runs across two episodes: one where Ed and Emily work out what they know and what they don't, and one where they bring in an expert to fill in the blanks.  

Get in touch at [email protected] or find Ed and Emily on LinkedIn, where you can vote on the questions we ask our next guest.

One December, Ed Ferris spent close to a million pounds on Google and Meta advertising. Revenue soared. Profit didn't move. He tells the full story here, including what happened when they cut the spend to around £100,000 the following year and then to roughly £10,000, and why the business ended up more profitable.

Emily Monsell-Holden, who’s led marketing and brand teams in-house for many years, names the contradiction most marketers live with: we all know social media makes us feel worse as individuals, then put a work hat on and build strategies that depend on it. 

They tackle a listener question about how to divide time and budget across an endless list of channels, and argue that most businesses pick channels long before they've worked out what they actually have to say. 

Part one of two.

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Impact Curious is hosted by Ed Ferris and Emily Monsell-Holden of The Impact Apothecary, the anti-consultancy for purpose-led leaders, based in Winchester. Every topic runs across two episodes: one where Ed and Emily work out what they know and what they don't, and one where they bring in an expert to fill in the blanks.  

Get in touch at [email protected] or find Ed and Emily on LinkedIn, where you can vote on the questions we ask our next guest.

Bella Lewis-Smith spent nineteen years building Salad Creative towards a trade sale. Then in a 2019 board meeting her co-director asked how much they really wanted it, and she realised they'd forgotten why they were scaling at all. 

She joins Ed Ferris and Emily Monsell-Holden to explain what an employee ownership trust actually involves: why it has to be at least 51% trust-owned, why nobody buys in and no contracts change, and how it differs from EMI schemes and direct ownership. 

She's candid about what they did right (and wring), telling her team over pizza on the beach in early COVID and learning that an intention without detail sends people straight to their worst fears. Four years on, she says she's enjoyed leading the business more in that time than in the twenty years before. 

Bella is founder and managing director of Salad Creative. 

Part two of two.

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Impact Curious is hosted by Ed Ferris and Emily Monsell-Holden of The Impact Apothecary, the anti-consultancy for purpose-led leaders, based in Winchester. Every topic runs across two episodes: one where Ed and Emily work out what they know and what they don't, and one where they bring in an expert to fill in the blanks.  

Get in touch at [email protected] or find Ed and Emily on LinkedIn, where you can vote on the questions we ask our next guest.

Ed Ferris grew up in retail with John Lewis as the only real example for employee ownership and could never understand how a company actually runs effectively when everyone owns a piece. Emily Monsell-Holden, who has spent her career helping businesses articulate what makes them special and embed it into their culture, talks about how genuinely rare it is to have employees at the centre of that conversation, despite every business claiming it.

They dig into whether employee ownership is a must for business, whether everyone actually wants the responsibility of thinking like an owner, and which well-known brands turn out to be employee-owned. Plus a listener question on how you keep decisions moving when everyone has a stake. 

Part one of two.

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Impact Curious is hosted by Ed Ferris and Emily Monsell-Holden of The Impact Apothecary, the anti-consultancy for purpose-led leaders, based in Winchester. Every topic runs across two episodes: one where Ed and Emily work out what they know and what they don't, and one where they bring in an expert to fill in the blanks.  

Get in touch at [email protected] or find Ed and Emily on LinkedIn, where you can vote on the questions we ask our next guest.