Willow Ethos – unlocking staff potential in small businesses

Being a small business means you rarely lack ideas, ambition or resilience; they’re what sit at the heart of who you are and define you as a company.

What small businesses often lack, however, is clarity: clarity about what drives performance, what gets in the way and how individual behaviours shape results in a fast-moving, resource-constrained environment.

Many small businesses need guidance on this, and business culture consultancies such as Willow Ethos can support when blockers arise in growth, performance, and culture.

ByteStart spoke to Paul Bennett and Matthew Bennett, Founding Partners of Willow Ethos, to talk about how, using toolsets developed by consultancies such as Willow Ethos, small businesses can overcome obstacles and bring real strategic advantage to their operations.

Paul and Matthew explain how teams in small businesses can create simple, evidence-based solutions to problems that can’t be solved by traditional means like process diagrams and RACI tables.

1. Small businesses don’t have layers – so behaviour matters more

In a small company, every person has a disproportionate impact. A single individual who avoids decisions, resists collaboration, or becomes overwhelmed under pressure can slow momentum for the whole business.

Matthew Bennett of Willow Ethos states this is more commonplace than small businesses realise (and they often don’t):

Our experience of using tools like TalentScope to analyse where relative areas of strength in the team’s capability exist, and where development needs to focus, means that we’re able to diagnose issues quickly and clearly. We then work with the team to coach the best behaviours to make everything work more smoothly, taking time to understand what makes everyone tick.

2. Culture gets set early in new businesses

Small businesses typically develop culture organically through founder influence, early hires, crisis responses, and unspoken norms (often unique to their business). Everything from after-work drinks to car parking spaces, this culture becomes the blueprint for all future behaviour, good and bad, and often psychologically linked to a common purpose and respect.

Willow Ethos state that they work with small businesses to reveal:

• What the current culture actually is, not what people assume it is

• Where small tensions or misalignments are already forming
• Whether the business is leaning more towards control, collaboration, innovation or stability
• How well this aligns with the organisation’s growth ambitions

For small businesses, mistakes made early are expensive later. The knock on effect is always bigger in small businesses. Willow Ethos works with small companies to minimise the chance of making the sorts of mistakes that can cost in the long run and learn from the experiences when they do happen (after all, nobody’s perfect).

3. The real power is alignment: strong people in the right environment

Paul, Matthew, and Willow Ethos state that the greatest performance happens when the two systems are overlaid: a behavioural strength in one environment can be a blocker in another. For example:

A highly strategic thinker may struggle in a culture that values rapid action over long-range planning.

• A naturally collaborative manager may feel constrained in a culture that rewards individual drive.
• A detail-oriented operator may flourish only when processes are valued, not when everything depends on improvisation among employees.

Willow Ethos work with clients using their experience and knowledge to help answer the biggest unasked questions:

“Who will thrive here, and what environment will help them thrive?”

Paul, Matthew, and Willow Ethos have worked with dozens of leaders at all levels to help them when they’ve wrestled with these sorts of issues, exploring different ways of approaching these problems so that they respond in a way that’s authentic to them and which recognises the human element in their business (which need never be forgotten).

4. We turn development from a cost into a superpower

Willow Ethos clients often tell them that they delay personal development because…

“We’ve got no dedicated HR function to organise it”

“Time is a resource we have too little of, and we are just treading water”

“Budgets are limited; our focus is on driving the bottom line”

But when development is targeted, behaviour-specific and culturally aligned, it becomes one of the most efficient investments a small business can make to both build on what it has and to propel it forward into the future. Anchoring employees with a sense of cohesion, psychological safety, and freedom to grow in their place in the organisation.

Paul and the Willow Ethos team specialise in solutions that are targeted, practical and data-driven, but perhaps most importantly, they ensure that everything remains culturally relevant along the journey, focusing on and supporting the sort of workplace environment that the company needs in order to thrive and achieve success in the market it operates within.

5. Good culture strengthens recruitment and succession

Small businesses don’t have the luxury of making mistakes when hiring, unfortunately, coupled with the expression buy cheap, buy twice.

Willow Ethos have a proven track record in recruitment and early onboarding guidance that helps organisations identify candidates who fit the working style and complement and support gaps in the current team, and those who bring the right balance of behaviours which complement and build on the desired culture.

This lays the foundation for sustainable growth and helps avoid the common small-business trap where everything rests on one or two people.

The bottom line & further information about Willow Ethos | Paul & Matthew Bennett

For small businesses, behavioural and cultural insight is not a “nice to have”. It is a direct performance force-multiplier.

By understanding how people naturally behave and how culture shapes their effectiveness, small organisations can increase their speed of execution, strengthen decision-making and create teams which allow true talent to thrive.

Most importantly, the work of consultancies like Willow Ethos unlocks potential by helping people use the resources they already have in the most effective, aligned and energising way.

To find out more about how Willow Ethos could support your small business, please visit their website.