Lucy's climate HR consultancy had grown faster than she'd ever imagined. With a talented team, a B Corp ambition, and a market that was evolving around her, she was ready to think about how to deepen her impact and where to take it next.
I've worked with Lucy since the early days of her business. What began as business coaching - positioning her business, building her client base, growing her team - had become one of the longest and most rewarding client relationships in my portfolio. You can read the earlier chapters of her story [here].
This chapter is about what happened when Lucy was ready to step back, look at the bigger picture, and build a strategy for the next stage of growth.
The Moment
By Year 4, Lucy's climate HR consultancy had grown faster than she'd ever expected. Revenue was approaching £850,000. She had a team of eight HR Business Partners, and a reputation as the specialist that climate businesses sought out by name.
The business was thriving - and that was exactly why Lucy wanted to pause and think. The plan we'd built together when she was finding her feet had done its job beautifully. But the business had grown so much, and so quickly, that she knew the next stage deserved its own thinking. The market was evolving, her team had developed in ways she hadn't anticipated, and new possibilities were opening up that the original plan simply hadn't imagined.
Being a good business - one that considers people and the planet - had always been at the heart of what Lucy was building. It wasn't a nice-to-have or an ambition for later; it was the reason the business existed. Now she wanted to deepen that commitment - to build it into the strategy itself, so that purpose shaped every choice about where they focused, how they grew, and what kind of impact they had as they looked ahead to 2030.
The Landscape
To understand what Lucy was thinking about, you need to understand the world she'd built her business in.
London's climate and sustainability sector is extraordinary. It's home to over 400 climate tech companies - the largest cluster in Europe - with startups collectively valued at £28 billion. The city has more dedicated climate tech VC firms than anywhere else on the continent. When Lucy had positioned her HR practice in this space four years earlier, it was a brilliant move: a thriving, fast-growing ecosystem with no specialist HR provision. She became the person climate businesses called.
By Year 4, the landscape had evolved. The sustainable business space had broadened well beyond climate tech startups, sustainable finance, and circular economy companies. New sectors were emerging. New kinds of organisations were doing purpose-led work that went beyond the original climate category.
Meanwhile, some of Lucy's competitors were expanding their offer - pairing HR consultancy with employment law, bringing in solicitors, and operating under the Solicitors Regulation Authority. A very different business model, and one that raised a genuine strategic question: was that the right direction?
And then there was the team. Lucy had asked her people to put together detailed personal and professional profiles - going beyond their CVs to capture what they cared about, what they knew, and where their deeper expertise lay. What came back delighted her. Several team members had backgrounds in biodiversity, nature restoration, and environmental policy.
Lucy herself had bought a place in the Wiltshire countryside - a weekend bolthole for the family. She was spending more time in nature, noticing what was happening to the land around her, and beginning to think about what protecting it might mean for the business she was building.
Lucy's success had deepened her commitment to building a better future and creating meaningful impact wherever she could. She wanted to become a B Corp - and that ambition, combined with a talented and capable team, a market that was evolving, and a drive to keep pushing herself further, meant she was ready for a fresh strategic planning process.
The Discovery Stage
Before we could make any strategic choices, we needed to understand what we were working with. This is the part of strategic planning that people don't always see - the careful preparation that makes the most of the strategic planning retreat itself.
We started with purpose - because everything else would follow from it. Lucy's original purpose statement had served her well, but now it needed to carry more weight. Drawing on the B Corp Purpose & Stakeholder Governance Standards, we built a purpose statement designed to anchor the whole strategy - one that went further than explaining why the company exists, framing how decisions would be made, how stakeholders would be involved, and how impact would be measured over time.
Then we mapped the people and groups most affected by the company's operations - employees, customers, and suppliers - and designed ways to hear from each of them. We ran tailored surveys for all three groups, asking which environmental, social, and governance factors they considered most critical to the business's long-term success, resilience, and value. We conducted in-depth interviews with a selection of customers. And we held an awayday with the full team - a day that surfaced what people thought about the business and what they brought to it that hadn't yet been tapped.
Lucy and her Chief of Staff took on the market analysis - looking at how the market for their services was changing, where the growth was, and where the gaps were. Lucy worked with her team to review their existing services, asking whether each one was still fit for purpose and whether there were new services they should be offering.
And it was during this phase that something remarkable happened. When the team started looking at the nature and biodiversity space as a potential direction, they discovered two things.
First, that while climate has become a polarising issue in public discourse, nature is something that unites people. More In Common's research found that 82 per cent of Britons say protecting nature and wildlife is important to them personally. Just under half - 48 per cent — believe the state of nature in the UK is declining. The UK ranks in the bottom 10 per cent of countries globally on the Biodiversity Intactness Index. People care about this deeply, and they care about it across the political spectrum.
Second, that nobody was specialising in this in the HR space. There were HR consultancies serving the broader sustainability sector, and there were environmental consultancies working on biodiversity strategy. But an HR practice with deep expertise in nature, wildlife, and conservation? That space was wide open.
The Strategic Planning Retreat
With all of this preparation done - stakeholder surveys analysed, market research completed, services reviewed, financial picture clear - we were ready to make decisions.
We held a two-day strategic planning retreat with her core team. Lucy brought her Chief of Staff and her Fractional Finance Director - the people who would implement whatever choices were made. I facilitated.
Day 1 began with celebrating what they'd built - the wins, the growth, the moments that mattered. Good strategy builds on what's strong. From there, we worked through the current situation: what their stakeholders had told them, what the financial data revealed, where their genuine strengths lay and where they were stretched. Then the external landscape - the forces shaping their market, the competitive dynamics, the opportunities they could respond to.
By the afternoon, we'd reached the heart of it - the core purpose and values that everything else would be built on. What did success look like, beyond the numbers? What would make this business better - specifically, for this team, these clients, the wider community they served? And then the question that always shapes the first day: where will you focus, and what will you say no to?
Day 2 was about turning those choices into something the team could act on. What made Lucy's agency the clear choice for a defined set of customers? What capabilities did they need, and which ones did they need to build? What management systems would keep this strategy alive after everyone went back to their desks?
The strategic choices that emerged were clear. Lucy chose to stay true to the character of the business. Rather than moving into employment law and the compliance world, she would build partnerships with values-aligned employment law firms - making that expertise available to clients who needed it, while keeping the business focused on what it does best. Expanding into nature and biodiversity became a central strategic choice - a new pillar of the business, grounded in the team's genuine expertise and a market opportunity that nobody else had seen. And the commitment to B Corp accreditation moved from an aspiration to a plan, with a purpose statement built to the standard, stakeholder engagement already embedded, and governance designed to support it.
And then the moment I love most in any strategic planning process: stepping back and testing whether the whole thing holds together. Walking through the full set of choices as a story - from purpose to systems - and asking: does this make sense as a whole? It did.
The Plan
After the retreat, I prepared a comprehensive report that pulled everything together - the information from the discovery phase, the strategic choices from the two days, and the non-negotiables the team had agreed on. I went through it in detail with Lucy and her Chief of Staff, testing each choice and making sure nothing had been missed.
From that report, I developed a full strategic plan - a working document with a revised purpose statement, clear priorities, defined timelines, and accountability for delivery. The strategy would guide them towards 2030 with clear objectives focused on where they could make the greatest difference in the next five years, using the B Corp framework to help ensure they were having the biggest impact they could with the resources they had.
One of the most significant pieces of work the plan set in motion was a complete brand, website, and marketing strategy. The existing brand was London-centric - it reflected the climate tech positioning that had served Lucy so well but didn't capture where the business was heading. The new positioning needed to hold both the London climate ecosystem and the nature and biodiversity space, and it needed to feel authentic to who this team had become.
The plan also anchored the business more clearly in its defined purpose, making stakeholders central to decision-making and aligning Lucy's ambitious commercial goals with her commitment to respect human rights and strengthen environmental stewardship.
What Happened Next
There's plenty happening behind the scenes - a new brand that reflects where the business is heading, the nature and biodiversity pillar taking shape, B Corp accreditation moving from ambition to action, and the everyday work of turning a strategic plan into reality. I couldn't be more excited to see it unfold, and to share the next chapter in Lucy's story when the time is right.
What I can say is this: Lucy came into the strategic planning process knowing she was ready for the next stage. She left with a plan that gave her business a clear direction - purpose-led, stakeholder-centred, commercially ambitious, and built on choices her whole team had shaped together. The kind of plan that doesn't just sit in a drawer, but changes how a business thinks about itself and what it's here to do.
That's what strategic planning is for. Not just a direction, but a deeper sense of why it matters - and a plan to get there.
This is how I work with clients on strategic planning. If Lucy's story resonates - whether your business has grown beyond its original plan, your market is evolving around you, or you know the next stage of growth deserves proper thinking - I'd welcome a conversation about what a strategic planning process could look like for you.
Related
[Lucy's Full Story - From Empty Diary to Climate HR Consultancy] - Parts 1, 2, and 3
Strategic Hope: The Methodology at the Heart of The Purpose Company
Purpose-Led Strategic Planning Explained
