Last month the Baxendale Employee Ownership team were in Liverpool for the EOA Annual Conference, the largest gathering in the UK ever for the employee-owned sector, where over 800 business leaders, employee owners, professional advisors and businesses considering EO came together to inspire, share stories, learn from one another, and celebrate being employee owned.

Being headline sponsor made for a rather busy two days; first up was Emily Alston, Senior Manager who welcomed everyone to the Conference talking about our 40^th year in employee ownership followed by Cristín Craig, Senior Legal Manager and Simon Everingham, Senior Manager delivering an informative seminar on “How to become employee owned”.

We were delighted to be joined by two of our clients Eyeful Presentations and Horizonscan later in the programme who spoke about their employee ownership journeys.

The EOA introduced the “silent theatre” to the programme, enabling Louise Fisher, Senior Legal Manager to present her “Baxendale EO Bitesize” video on succession objectives.  This is the first in a series of video presentations from Louise we very much look forward to sharing more in  2024.

Ewan Hall, Director and Hannah Welch, Consultant led the final workshop on “How to keep your governance alive and kicking”, there was lots of discussion on how to refresh and evolve governance structures. In 2024, we will be working in partnership with the EOA to deliver a brand new EO Learn course aimed at employee-owned businesses looking to introduce strategies for impactful reward, governance and employee participation.

There was a night of celebration on the Monday evening at the UK Employee Ownership Awards where Ewan Hall, Director presented the Philip Baxendale Fellowship Award. The UK Employee Ownership Awards were originally known as the Philip Baxendale Awards (set up in honour of our founder, Philip Baxendale), and it was pleasure to present the award to Steve Parfett, former Director of Parfetts, a cash and carry business his father founded in 1980; Steve has been a tireless advocate of employee ownership over many years and we could not think of a more worthy winner.

It was great to meet up with old friends and make lots of new friends, thank you to everyone who stopped by our exhibition stand to wish us a happy 40^th birthday, it really did mean a lot to the team. We are now back at our desks, feeling inspired and incredibly proud to be wearing the “Proudly Employee Owned” badge.

We are employee owners working together for employee-owned businesses.