Welcome to our first-ever Independent Trustee
We are delighted to welcome Ann Tyler, Chair of Ownership at work and passionate advocate of employee ownership, to our board of trustees.
Quite a lot has happened since 2019 when our co-founders Tom and Olly sold the business to an Employee Owned Trust. We’ve doubled in size, established a team in Manilla and reached financial freedom two years ahead of schedule! We also took home the Delivering Good Leadership Award at the 2022 EOA awards, and we now stand at a pivotal point in our history where we can set an exciting new vision for the next ten years.
It felt like the right time to get some external perspective, knowledge and support with how we continue to evolve our employee-owned business by recruiting our first independent trustee.
We’re very excited for the future of Torchbox as a financially-independent, employee-owned organisation. We’re ambitious to push this ownership model as far as it can go and create the most rewarding employee experience we can. To do this, we need to combine our creativity and enthusiasm with real expertise in employee ownership, and no one can offer much more of that than Ann Tyler, so it’s a great pleasure to welcome her to our Trust board.
Olly Willans, Co-founder and CSO
Ann Tyler, a Cambridge graduate and qualified solicitor, has over 35 years of experience in legal and policy advice and consulting work in employee ownership. She has advised on employee ownership schemes in various public and private companies, and her extensive list of experience includes setting up the first ESOP in the UK in Roadchef Limited and reviewing the Labour Party’s policy on Employee Ownership as part of The Hunt Review.
I'm passionate about using my many years of experience in the EO sector to support companies and their employees succeed as independent employee-owned businesses with a meaningful culture of participation and engagement. I'm delighted to be joining Torchbox as their first independent Trustee, now that they are a financially independent, 100% employee-owned company with what I know will be an exciting future ahead.
Ann Tyler, Chair, Ownership at Work
We’re all looking forward to working with Ann to develop the role and draw on the benefits that an independent trustee, with extensive experience, can bring to our EOT board.
Ann will join us for her first quarterly EOT meeting on the 28th of March and meet some of the co-owners based in the Bristol office.
