This week’s Founder Friday covers Beth Hall on why she stopped chasing headcount and started building a business she actually wanted to run.
“It is very easy to build yourself a successful business that recreates all the things you were trying to get away from.”
This week’s Founder Friday, we sat down with Beth Hall, founder of workplace culture consultancy Culture Edge, to talk about the year she said yes to everything, and why she decided never to do it again.
Hall knows the lesson firsthand. An early “year of saying yes” saw her business grow quickly, but it also had her working six and seven days a week, and losing the flexibility and independence that had drawn her to working for herself in the first place.
“It is very easy to build yourself a successful business that recreates all the things you were trying to get away from,” Hall says.
That experience reshaped how she thought about growth altogether. Rather than building a bigger consultancy, hiring a team and spending more of her time managing people, Hall chose to build a stronger specialist practice around her own expertise instead.
“I had to separate growth from headcount, I realised I didn’t necessarily want to build a bigger consulting business. I wanted to build a stronger practice,” she says. “At this stage of my career I wanted to focus on the work itself, my clients and my family.”
Hall’s career in Australia began by turning her UK retail experience into a business, gradually expanding into leadership, management and corporate work. It shifted again after the birth of her first child, Joshua, when she moved into instructional design to build more flexibility, and shifted once more after her second child, Eleanor, arrived.
“Going from one child to two felt like going from a pet to a zoo,” Hall says.
Self-employment with two young children no longer worked, so she joined one of her favourite clients, Cotton On Group, full-time. It became one of the most formative periods of her career. Hall built the company’s first in-house university and group learning function, supporting employees across 19 countries and eight brands, and worked directly with founder Nigel Austin on a problem that fascinated her: how a rapidly growing business scales without losing the culture that made it work in the first place.
“That taught me an important lesson: values alignment doesn’t necessarily mean operating-model alignment.”
At the same time, Hall was studying psychology, later completing a Master’s in Organisational Psychology. Further roles in consulting, a boutique organisational psychology practice, and an industry membership body, where she developed a national HR capability framework, rounded out her experience before she returned to working for herself.
“In many ways, starting Culture Edge felt less like starting something completely new and more like bringing together everything I had learned across the previous 15 years,” she says.
Hall’s biggest strategic choice hasn’t been what to build, but what not to. She initially planned to launch Culture Edge with a group of other practitioners, each running their own practice under a shared umbrella. The group shared similar values, but after six months realised they wanted very different things from their businesses.
Her other major decision was writing her first book, Culture by Design, due for publication in February 2027, a deliberate step toward building a body of thought beyond her work inside individual organisations.
