“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.”
From retail training to organisational psychology
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.
Learning by doing
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.
What differentiates Culture Edge, Hall says, is the combination of organisational psychology, practical business experience and systems thinking.
“Culture is often talked about in terms of values, engagement, leadership behaviours or how people feel about working somewhere. Those things matter, but culture is also shaped by how work actually happens,” she says. “Often, what appears to be a people problem is actually a system producing entirely predictable behaviour.”
Looking back, Hall says she wouldn’t change much, including the parts that didn’t work. Each stage taught her something: the early collaborative model clarified the kind of practice she wanted, taking on too much taught her about capacity and boundaries, and subcontracting confirmed she didn’t want to build a team.
“You can spend an enormous amount of time trying to design the perfect business before you start, but sometimes you need to start, experiment and let experience give you better information,” she says. “The important thing is to keep making deliberate choices as you learn. And think beyond the business itself. Ask what kind of life you want it to enable.”
For Hall, that now means being increasingly selective about the work Culture Edge takes on, guided by where she can add the most value, and where she wants to put her energy.
Keep up to date with our stories on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.