As the conversation around workplace health and wellbeing grows louder, the need to keep workforces in good health has become all the more vital.
Not only leading those conversations but helping businesses take the necessary steps towards ensuring a healthy workplace is Rachel Linstead, owner and director of Firecracker-UK.
Having founded Firecracker in 2011, qualified nutritionist and business coach Rachel works with businesses in Greater Lincolnshire and beyond to help them see the impact health and nutrition can have upon workplace culture.
As the daughter of two chefs, Rachel has harnessed her love and knowledge of food into curating a combination of nutrition programmes and coaching, which she has used to help over 100 employers nationwide to improve their staff’s performance.
‘What you eat ultimately impacts on how you feel, perform and think,’ says Rachel, who is based in Scampton, Lincolnshire. ‘Yet food is given such little significance in life in general, and even less so in the workplace. I think people are finally realising that if you have a happy, healthy workforce, you’ve also got a productive workforce.
‘I think people underestimate how positive workforces affect the bottom line as much as an unhealthy workforce does. A lot of stuff around what I do is intangible, but there are tangible benefits – obviously the bottom line gets better, but it’s harder to measure than if you were to send someone on sales training and then they improve sales. However, there’s lots of statistics out there now that suggest the return is fantastic.’
Rachel’s journey towards starting Firecracker has been long but eventful, starting as far back as the early 1990s when she worked as a food technologist for the consumer goods giant Unilever in Crawley, West Sussex.
‘I loved working for Unilever, but it got to a point where I really struggled with corporate life,’ Rachel explains. ‘I joined at the same time as a very good friend of mine – we met at the interview stage when we both went for the same job, and in fact they took us both on. However, her career progressed through the ranks of Unilever and mine didn’t, and I couldn’t really understand why.
Several years after her 7-year stint at Unilever, Rachel was diagnosed with dyslexia, but as opposed to seeing her learning difficulties as a barrier to overcome, she used the discovery to gain both clarity on her past and direction for her future.
‘I think [my dyslexia] is why I didn’t fit in in the corporate world,’ believes Rachel, who wasn’t diagnosed until she was in her mid-30s. ‘Being dyslexic, I think I struggled to fit in, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. I like to do my own thing because I can work as I like. I’m proud to be dyslexic, it makes me who I am and it gives me my creativity.
She adds: ‘I follow my gut quite a lot and when I don’t feel like something’s quite right, I’ll do something different. I didn’t get bored [at Unilever] as such, but I wanted to see what other things I could do.’
Rachel’s gut led her towards the prosperous world of part-time education, where she worked towards becoming a personal trainer. As soon as she was qualified as a trainer and fitness instructor, she broke away from her corporate background and ‘literally jumped’ into the fitness industry.
The newly-certified PT was particularly driven by the discourses within the fitness and food industries at that, and was keen to explore a grey area between the two.
‘I was always hearing people talking about food and exercise and nutrition and weight loss – there were gyms that were giving loads of focus on exercise, and then you had the diet industry talking about how you should eat. However, I felt like there was nobody giving both equal importance and I guess that’s why I started on this little journey of mine.’
Rachel dived into another part-time course in nutritional therapy, but amidst some personal challenges in her life surrounding redundancy and illness, decided that London was no longer the place for her career to flourish and relocated in 2006.
‘I don’t think I’m naturally a city person,’ says Rachel, who was born in South Wales and grew up in Somerset. ‘I crave the countryside and open spaces, so one day I just sold the flat and moved to Lincolnshire.’
Not being familiar with the landscape of the county before, Rachel frequented jobs fairs on the hunt for her opportunity to work within the food industry. This is where she was introduced to the Food and Drink Forum, a Nottingham-based organisation supporting food businesses across the East Midlands, who put her forward for a food specialist business coaching role locally.
She ended up working in this role for around six years, before deciding that she needed to flex the proverbial muscles she started to build up during her time in the fitness industry, particularly during her run as a senior manager of a gym and health club.
‘We ran the gym and the standalone business even though we were part of a group,’ she explains. ‘We were given our own budgets and our own P&Ls, and we were told to kind of run it as our own business. My parents founded their own businesses as well, so I’ve got a lot of experience with working in small businesses and how those businesses work.’
When she turned her managerial skills to founding Firecracker in 2011, Rachel started by supporting food businesses across Greater Lincolnshire before broadening her focus to a national scale. She believes that Greater Lincolnshire has the necessary infrastructure within Lincolnshire for fellow entrepreneurs to launch their own businesses.
‘I think the resources are there, but I also think it’s about the people that you know,’ she adds. ‘I was probably in a privileged place because I knew where I needed to go, and who I could talk to.
‘Right now, I think there’s loads of support for businesses. I think the challenge is getting that information openly available to the general public, because there is so much support available but I don’t think many of the businesses or new startups realise that. I don’t think the information is hidden, it’s just not well known where to find it, unless you’ve had some contact with some sort of business support.’
After the support that she has received to build Firecracker’s profile, Rachel is paying it forward by working alongside the Greater Lincolnshire LEP to support independent businesses in the area.
‘There’s lots of businesses I speak to who have never heard of bodies like the Greater Lincolnshire LEP. I’m helping to do something about that, but I think more could be done to promote the available support.’
In the 8-years-and-counting lifespan of Firecracker, Rachel has celebrated her fair share of landmark achievements – from being contacted by a major supermarket to analyse more than 7,000 of their recipes for nutritional information, to hosting this year’s Lincolnshire Workplace Health and Wellbeing Conference at The Showroom, Lincoln in May.
‘[The conference was] was a massive milestone. I wanted people to start talking about workplace health and really implementing it, so getting some great feedback around the conference was something I could really celebrate.’
It was particularly worth celebrating for Rachel, who argues that her biggest challenge in running Firecracker is encouraging businesses to recognise the importance of workplace health, rather than ‘just being a tick-box to give to HR to do’.
She says: ‘It’s something that is embraced by the whole culture and organisation, but people still don’t want to open that can of worms because when they do, they realise it’s costing the business a lot more and they don’t know what to do about it.
‘The subtleties of what I do could actually have a big difference for businesses but it’s harder to measure. It’s not just about the bottom line, it’s actually about people and getting the people [that run the business] to stop thinking just in black-and-white numbers.’
Despite giving lectures and workshops to thousands of people, and supporting hundreds of small businesses through funded programmes, Rachel is content with Firecracker staying as the one-woman band it is now. Using local suppliers ‘whenever possible’, she’s less interested in expanding her business, when she can put her resources towards helping others build their own.
‘I might employ people in the future, but let’s say I needed a PA – I’d rather purchase a PA service from another small business rather than have my own PA. I’m much more willing to give my turnover to other small businesses to help them flourish and have a flexible, agile workspace. [Starting a business] is a vision and a passion a lot of people have, and I just think: go for it!’
So what’s the single most valuable piece of advice Rachel can impart to these budding entrepreneurs – the sort of people she sees a lot of herself when she moved to Lincolnshire 13 years ago in?
‘Find and ask for help. We do have a number of business support programmes that are available through funded streams, so go out and find these things and talk to people. Everybody wants to help with business support – we want the economy to flourish within Lincolnshire.’
For more information about Rachel and Firecracker-UK, visit firecracker-uk.co.uk.