After a career spanning over 25 years working in the HR profession, entrepreneur Wendy Dean spotted a gap in the market to provide hands on support for companies looking to progress through better engagement with their staff.

After a career spanning over 25 years working in the HR profession, entrepreneur Wendy Dean spotted a gap in the market to provide hands on support for companies looking to progress through better engagement with their staff. This led to Wendy at the age of 50 set up the Strategi Solutions Group in 2015, and are now recognised as finalists for the Lloyds Bank New Business of the Year.

Wendy set about developing culture change programmes to help businesses to achieve every employer's goal of having a happier, more motivated and ultimately more productive workforce.

The culture change programmes have been incredibly successful, having been delivered to businesses that operate with workforces ranging from 80 to 3,000 employees. While the programmes are bespoke to each client they all however embrace the innovative concept that culture within an organisation has to be driven from the bottom up, through the employee champions.

Wendy said: "I truly believe that the most successful businesses place their people at the heart of their business strategy. I've created culture change programmes that help businesses to really focus on what I believe is their most important and valuable asset, their people".

While Strategi was launched with the original goal of delivering culture change programmes, the company has seen rapid growth as a result of Wendy identifying further areas to support business including HR, learning and development, recruitment, marketing, PR and design.

The continued diversification has helped Strategi grow their customer base from 3 to 50 in just under two years, that includes companies such as Palletforce, NFT and Uttoxeter Racecourse.

Wendy credits Strategi's incredible success to continuing to diversify and the creation of the right team, which has grown from just one at launch to fifteen with plans to recruit even further. The team at Strategi have been carefully selected by Wendy so that they are highly skilled in their respective areas, having worked in industry so that they have the ‘big business know how' to support other businesses. The credentials of the team have been instrumental in helping Strategi to overcome the challenge of building a strong reputation quickly.

The Strategi business has been profitable right from day one. From the beginning the decision was taken to continually reinvest all profits back into the business to support the growth of the team and development of the business. The company's sustained growth has actually therefore been self-financed. In the current financial year the company has achieved a turnover of £0.6 million, which is projected to grow to £3 million in just 3 years time.

Having recently moved to new premises to accommodate their expanding team, Strategi remains focused on both developing their existing services including adding new training programmes, as well as looking to offer new complimentary services in response to feedback from their customers.

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