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Fran Spence: Aligning Purpose and Profit through Employee Ownership
Still We Grow was founded with a mission to fill a critical gap in the employee ownership landscape. While the employee ownership business model is growing rapidly in the UK, many businesses transitioning to Employee Ownership Trusts (usually known as EOTs) lack ongoing advisory support beyond the legal and financial transaction. At Still We Grow, we believe there is a better way: combining multidisciplinary consulting with data-driven insights to help employee-owned companies thrive long after the transition is complete.
When Fran Spence describes her career path, she calls it “squiggly.” A chartered accountant with a law degree, with roles spanning finance, marketing, strategy, and governance, she’s not followed a straight line. But there’s always been one common thread: the desire to do good business while doing good for people. Supporting the UK’s employee ownership community through Still We Grow was the perfect next step.
Finding the employee ownership model
The path to becoming an employee ownership expert was equally squiggly: Fran didn’t set out to find the model, the model found her.
While consulting for small and medium-sized businesses, she encountered employee ownership as a way to bring purpose and passion together with commercial value.
Around the same time, she met an independent trustee who urged her to consider applying her unique mix of skills and experience in the space. The idea stuck, reinforced when her husband joined the leadership team of an employee-owned company a few years after its transition.
“It felt like these businesses were coming at me left, right and centre,” Fran reflects. “So I stopped resisting and leaned in! What I really like about employee ownership is it promotes collective responsibility and shared success. So when everyone puts the work in and gets the job done, it’s that group of people who ultimately benefit.”
Embracing employee ownership
As well as being Still We Grow’s Commercial Director, Fran serves as an independent trustee for Employee Owned Trusts (EOTs), one of the UK’s most popular models for employee ownership.
She explains: “The role of a trustee director is to look after the interests of the employee beneficiaries, because they are the owners of the shares in the company. What a trustee director actually does varies from business to business, but ultimately, the role is about looking after the investment the employee-owners have made on their behalf. Sometimes that means checking in with the main company board, making sure they’re making sensible decisions and running the company in a way which is for the betterment of everybody’s investment.”
Fran’s insight as an independent trustee gives her a birds’ eye view of common challenges employee-owned businesses face – another impetus for starting Still We Grow.
Common challenges employee-owned businesses face
While employee ownership is growing in popularity in the UK (witness the recent transition of toy brand The Entertainer to employee ownership in September 2025) it’s not risk-free. The most common challenges are:
- New leadership teams might not have been in senior leadership positions previously; they also might not have the same appetite for risk that the founders have had
- Founders have to wait longer for the proceeds of the sale than in other transactions; they most commonly paid out over a longer time period by the ongoing profits of the business.
- Founders like the idea of preserving their original vision through selling their business to employees – but fail to step away far or fast enough to allow employee owners to step up.
This is where Fran’s steady mix of governance, commercial insight, and empathy comes in. Like the rest of the Still We Grow team, she is clear that the transaction is only the start of the journey.
She helps employee-owned businesses manage “growing pains” after the transaction: building new structures, processes, governance, and financial controls that can help new employee-leaders step into those leadership positions.
And she is clear on when transitioning to an employee ownership model isn’t appropriate:
Because of the way these deals are structured, most commonly being funded by the ongoing profits of the business to pay the founder the value of the shares they’ve sold, if the business isn’t in a position to generate those future cash flows, that’s a red flag.
Still We Grow offers more than the typical legal and finance help for businesses transitioning to an employee ownership model. Like her co-founders Matt Wilden and Martin Chadwick, Fran is committed to helping employee owned businesses thrive after the sale and continue to grow. “Our involvement doesn’t stop at the transaction,” Fran says. “For us, that’s when the real work begins.”
Ready to start your journey into employee ownership? Already proudly EO and interested in accelerating your growth through data-driven insights, multidisciplinary consulting and deep EO expertise? Contact us today.