Back to school week. Box-fresh shoes, new geometry sets and at With, a new training timetable.

Since becoming 100% employee owned, there’s more at stake. Everyone at With is an owner of this business and with that comes a closer connection to the decisions we make, the P&L, the standards we set and the impact each of us can have on where With goes next.

That requires us to invest differently in our people too.

So we’ve been building a step-change training programme designed around our vision for the business and, importantly, the critical thinking and behaviours we’ll need to get there.

We kicked things off last year with six months of AI training with Stephen Waddington and this year we’re going further.

We’re working with leadership and growth coach Claire Haynes on a programme of one-to-one personal impact, accountability workshops and listening training. Alongside colour psychology and CliftonStrengths frameworks for everyone to better understand themselves, each other and how we work together. 

And each of our directors is taking Mark Ritson’s MiniMBA in Marketing. Not to turn us into marketers, but to make us better business communications advisers: strengthening our understanding of the decisions that happen upstream of communications and helping us connect what we do even more closely to our clients’ wider marketing and commercial priorities.

We’re building curiosity into the programme too: encouraging curious minds to ask better questions, dig a little deeper and find the insight that others might miss – a With ‘reading week’ at The British Library IP Centre, no less.

Different programmes, but one intention behind them: helping brilliant people increase the impact they can have – on their clients, their colleagues and the business they collectively own.

Our proposition to clients is communications that get your business to a better future, faster. We’re backing our own people with the same ambition.

Getting our people to their future, and With to ours, faster.