Hi there, I'm Angela Steel, and I'm the founder of SuperWellness, a workplace wellbeing company I started in 2011. Since then, I've gone from being a 'one woman band' to setting up an associate model, to employing and growing an amazing full-time team of 12.

Today my business supports hundreds of employers to look after their teams and ensure they are fully engaged and productive. Our clients tend to be large organisations and some, like Sky, Kier, Loughborough University, the NHS and others, employ teams thousands of times larger than us.

Rewarding though our work is, I would love to help more small businesses and fellow founders who are facing a specific set of challenges I'm very familiar with: how to build a high performance team that sets your business up for growth and a work culture that develops and motivates everyone involved? I don't claim to know all the answers. I'm still learning each day and will be for a long time yet, but I've decided to take the leap and find out what I can do to help others who might be earlier in their journey.

If you're a fellow founder thinking "yes this could be of interest", then please add your name below and share a bit about what's keeping you up at night. I will keep you updated as my new project develops 🚀

Recognise any of these challenges?

I know first hand what it's like to be boostrapping a startup from scratch and building a team that will take it to new heights. To say it's not easy would be an understatement. Even when you are surrounded with amazing and supportive people like I have been, it can be a lonely place and, over the years, I've often wished I could speak to someone who'd been in my shoes. They might have helped me to avoid some costly mistakes, accelerated our progress and probably saved some sleepless nights too.

Here are just some of the questions I've faced myself and where my experience could come in handy:

How to build a team from scratch with very limited resources - e.g. no external investment?

Developing a team culture that's authentic and supports high performance.

Important processes, systems and contacts to have in place.

How to collaborate effectively when working as a remote team?

How to manage your own wellbeing as a founder, develop the resilience you need to get through testing times, and avoid burnout?

When things go wrong - how to avoid the pitfalls as much as possible but also what to do when they inevitably come up?

Planning your team structure, and defining roles that are aligned with your business needs as well as people's 'zone of excellence'.

Managing constant change: evolving roles and developing your team as the business grows.

My story

How it all started

Over the years I've learnt a lot about the practical side of building a team (not least from having made my fair share of mistakes!). I left my comfortable career in technology marketing in 2011 to pursue a newfound passion for health and wellbeing. Prior to this I had retrained and qualified in nutrition and it took me two years before finding the courage to take the leap and start SuperWellness. I began by running a one-to-one clinic, working with private clients, and soon realised how many people struggled to balance their health with the intensity of their working life, and how this was affecting them as well as the companies they worked for.

I began to think about the win-win it could be if employers were to support their teams to gain precious knowledge about ways to improve their health through lifestyle adjustments, in a way that was practical and doable, not 'preachy'. I knew I had to pick up the phone and reach out to companies to offer my services. I was terrified!

Day after day I pushed myself to make those calls, and when I did get through to someone, they tended to be very sceptical about the idea of nutrition having anything at all to do with the workplace (things have changed a lot since then). Finally I landed my first client: Harrods. I remember jumping up and down with glee in my little home office: yess!!! No matter how hard it had been, seeing that Harrods were willing to pay for my services gave me the proof I needed to know that my hunch was worth pursuing.

Setting up a team

Fast forward a couple of years and I was juggling a number of clients - and doing everything myself: marketing, selling, writing workshops, recipes and lots of other content, designing programmes, and presenting all of these as well. I needed to start building a team, but without investment, was in no position to employ anyone, so with the help of a mentor, I set up an associate programme.

With 15 associates around the UK, SuperWellness was now able to deliver its programmes (tried and tested by me!) across a much wider geographical area, and the plan was to grow the SuperWellness brand in the corporate space. I learnt a lot in the process about the benefits and drawbacks of the associate model and it was becoming clear that without employing a dedicated team, working full time in the business, this approach would only take us so far.

And then the pandemic hit. That spring had been shaping up to be one of our busiest times ever, with more and more clients booking us in for workshops and other programmes. One by one, every booking was cancelled in a matter of days and like many others, we had to reinvent ourselves as an online business.

Eventually there was a big silver lining to moving online though. It reduced the costs of delivering our programmes (not to mention travel time!) and made them accessible to teams that were spread out across different locations. We even began to work with global companies. It was a steep learning curve as we adapted to international audiences and massively extended our range of expertise in response to our clients' new requirements and the sweeping wellbeing trends that were taking place in quick succession, a big one being the need to support remote and hybrid teams. Wellbeing had come of age, and the time had come for SuperWellness to recruit its first full-time employees.

Building an authentic team culture

As we navigated the early stages of buidling a team, we soon realised the importance of proactively developing a team culture that aligned with the business's ethos and supported its future goals. Our commercial director Amanda played a key part in shaping our culture. Having managed teams of all sizes including large sales teams in her previous corporate career, Amanda provided crucial knowledge when it came to managing specific situations as well as articulating what good looked like. To support this work, Amanda soom became qualified as a DISC practitioner, which meant she could conduct assessments with anyone new joining the team, to determine the communication style that best suited their profile and importantly, carry out workshops with our entire team sparking incredibly productive open conversations around teamwork, helping us all understand each other's differences and how we could bring the best out of one another.

Meanwhile, our clients' priorities have shifted towards the importance of team culture too. As organisations' wellbeing approach matures, more and more are looking beyond general awareness to the root causes of issues that affect their team's wellbeing. Increasingly they are recognising that employee wellbeing means so much more than 'pizza Friday' and that getting it wrong can be costly when it comes to the entire organisation's performance.

I was determined to build up my own knowledge and understanding of the research in this area to make sure we were giving our clients the best support we could. This led me to study Organisational Psychology and complete my Masters in December 2023. It was a HUGE eye opener learning about the theory and research behind important topics like team motivation, culture, career development and many others. But I'm a 'doer' above all, and what I've enjoyed most has been applying these learnings within the context of our own small business.