Caroline Kinsey, Cirkle

How this year’s Female Entrepreneur of the Year has founded her company’s success on building a people-focused culture and ditching the duvet day.

When Caroline Kinsey founded PR agency Cirkle a decade ago, she faced a serious recruitment headache: based in Buckinghamshire, turning ambitious PRs’ heads away from London proved decidedly tricky. To address the problem, she decided to create a culture to ensure that once hired, staff seldom left.

In an industry notorious for staff churn, the strategy has worked a treat. “My role is to make sure my team are happy,” Kinsey says. “Strong retention means clients get consistency of personnel.” Those clients include Pepsi, GSK, Cadbury’s and Premier Foods.

“Because they work in a client’s business for longer, they understand the brand better and we deliver stronger campaigns as a result.”

Kinsey is no fan of perfunctory nods to employee retention, and despises the infamous ‘duvet day’, effectively an official sanctioning of an unplanned day of holiday. “It reflects badly on our industry that we think we have the right to stay in bed because we’re tired, hungover or not in the mood,” she says.

Instead, Cirkle gives staff an extra day’s holiday to do something which “invests in their health and wellbeing,” which apparently encompasses everything from an exhibition to a yoga retreat or skydive, with the company footing 25% of the expense.

Where others are cutting back on training budgets, Cirkle recently launched a company wide programme which will see the firm invest around £2,500 per head to give each employee a monthly training session.

Kinsey, who was named ‘Britain’s Fittest Director’ by the Daily Telegraph in 2007, is also setting up a new business called ‘Trojan Training’ to take fitness training into offices. She has recently added a mentoring role in Peter Jones’ fledgling National Enterprise Academy to a forbidding list of extracurricular activities, which includes regular lectures on female entrepreneurship.

However, with Cirkle enjoying double digit growth and solid profit margins, she won’t be spending too much time out of the business. “Clients are being more demanding but we rise to that,” she says. “We’ve got a closer hand on the figures than ever and I’m very clear on how the business needs to develop.”