PPL has been recognised as a Finalist in the SEUK Awards and Highly Commended in the Lloyds British Business Excellence Awards!
PPL has been ‘Highly Commended’ by the British Business Excellence Awards in the ‘Purpose Before Profit’ category. PPL was also one of six finalists in the Health and Social Care category at the Social Enterprise UK Awards. We are so proud of this recognition of our resilience and our long-term journey doing business differently together.
Within any organisation there are unwritten rules. One of our unwritten rules is that we don’t generally “do awards”. We have limited time and energy and we feel that our time is better spent on our work, volunteering, charity partnerships and learning than on award submissions. We are also uncomfortable with singling out any one of our projects as ‘better’ than another. Anyone who has worked in consultancy knows that it is often the least glamorous and hardest projects that go beyond sounding impressive and become that most impressive thing of all – real change. These projects rarely lend themselves to a neat 500-word award submission. The reward has to be in the outcomes, the relationships and the satisfaction of having lived up to our unofficial team motto –
“Do what you can, where you are, with what you have”.
But some awards are different. We are really proud to be recognised by our peers and clients annually in the FT Top 50 Consultancies in the UK. We are equally proud to be in the B Corp Top 5% Best in the World for the way we work as a team. Both awards allow us to describe a way of working in consultancy that takes the absolute best of the consultancy model – its creativity, intelligence, analysis and passion – and achieves it through building a sustainable, resilient and empowering workplace.
PPL is a very unusual organisation. As a social enterprise, we donate half of our profits at the end of each year to charity and give each team member 10 days of paid volunteering time. As a consultancy, we compete on our own terms with traditional organisations with very different commercial models. When we saw the opportunity to apply to the Lloyds Bank British Business Excellence Awards and the Social Enterprise UK Awards, we saw an opportunity to tell the story of how it is possible to combine the best of consultancy with the opportunity to achieve impact in a range of additional ways.
This year, we are proud to have been a Finalist in the Health and Social Care Social Enterprise of the Year at the Social Enterprise UK Awards, and to have been Highly Commended in the BBEA Purpose before Profit Award. Both awards tell our story of having the courage to test out new ways of defining and delivering value and of taking the opportunity to grow and develop within this model. This experience has made us more confident in telling our story and reaching out to collaborate even more with others on the same journey. Our unofficial rule might need to be more of a guideline in future, as we seek to open up new connections and to share on own learning and journey more widely!
We founded PPL in 2008 with a clear vision to deliver high quality outcomes in partnership with our clients, and to do so as an organisation we would all be proud to work for. We have learned this year that sharing that pride in the way we work opens us up to even more of the growth and connection that makes our client delivery so impactful and unique.
In the words of Claire Kennedy and Simon Morioka, our two Chief Executives:
“PPL is always moving forward and always changing but, by having a clear sense of what we are trying to do and where we are heading, we get to share that journey with each other, with our partners and with our clients”.
We think that’s a great way to travel.
