In this episode of Stake & Soul, Barry speaks with Tom Vincent, CEO of 2020 Project Management Training, the Scottish-founded, UK-based specialist that transitioned to an Employee Ownership Trust in 2018 and, seven years on, was named EO Business of the Year at the 2025 UK Employee Ownership Awards. Tom joined 2020 in 2014 after a career in the Royal Engineers, moved onto the board in 2018 just as the EOT deal was being done, and inherited both the CEO chair and the responsibility of paying off the deferred consideration, which is now, at the time of recording, just two months from being fully cleared.
Tom’s story is not the founder’s story. He was recruited into the sales function, coached formally into succession, then handed a business he did not build. This episode is an honest walk through what that process looked like: the year of shadowing, the CC’d inbox, the rebuild of the board, the 2022 HMRC crisis that sent him out on a 20-mile marathon-training run at one in the morning, and the culture that has kept 2020 in the 99th percentile of the Good Work Survey for five years running.
What’s covered in this episode:
- Tom’s route from the Royal Engineers via Sandhurst and the ECITB into 2020’s sales function in 2014, and the female leader early in his career who shaped how he thinks about diverse decision-making
- Scottish Enterprise’s role in exposing founder Tony to the EO model, and the train journey to Edinburgh where Tony first sounded Tom out about the future of the business
- The two years of shadowing and coaching, including the “what do you actually do as a CEO?” question that Tony couldn’t immediately answer, and the CC’d inbox strategy that followed
- Rebuilding the board deliberately smaller (from five to three) and consciously more diverse, with a senior leadership team created to widen the range of voices at the top
- The three-phase share sale (60%, then 30%, then the final 10% agreed a year ago), and the reasoning the vendors themselves gave for eventually letting go of the last piece
- Communication cadence: why annual EO sessions are not enough, and how 2020 now uses quarterly voice sessions and a dedicated workshop to answer the elephant-in-the-room questions
- The financial freedom plan Tom is preparing to take to the trust board: an early emphasis on reserves, then a gradual swing towards profit distribution once the business is properly resilient
- The two values that define 2020’s culture: “finding solutions” (a non-blame, always-a-way-through mindset) and “empowerment” (with substance behind the word, not just a poster)
- The Good Work Survey run at the busiest time of year for five years running, and the moment Tom sat down with the results and realised every negative comment was a positive suggestion for how to get better
- Winning EO Business of the Year at the 2025 UK Employee Ownership Awards, and the “no passengers here” culture Tom credits for the win
Quickfire highlights
- Employee ownership is: amazing.
- Biggest EO surprise: how fun the journey can be, working with like-minded people to create value.
- Book recommendation: Good to Great by Jim Collins first suggested to Tom by his CEO peer network, and the book he now recommends to others.
- Confessional: a moment of honesty. In 2022, mid-way through the handover from Tony, Tom discovered the business owed HMRC a significant sum. Lying awake at 1am, he pulled on his running gear (he was training for the Marathon des Sables) and headed out for a 20-mile run. Ten miles from home he had a moment of clarity that all his self-pity was egotistical; the business, the staff and the future mattered more than his personal fear of being the CEO under whose watch it might fold.
Barry and Tom also discuss the SWOT workshop day that Tom now wishes 2020 had started running in 2018 rather than 2022, and Tom’s advice to any founder still weighing up EO – start from a “why”, not just a “how much”.
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