It’s been more than three years since CPL and Century One combined to form CPL One Group. Finance and operations director, Laura Papworth-Saunders reflects on the journey.
Companies House recently acknowledged the formal dissolution of the entity ‘Century One Publishing Ltd’. While we have not referenced the Century One name externally for at least 12 months, for me, and others in our team, this was a significant milestone.
I’m writing this on a busy Wednesday from our St Albans office (what was, until the creation of CPL One Group in 2022, the Century One Publishing Ltd office). Today is a ‘cake day’ and I’m surrounded by my not-so-new colleagues. While eating a slice of homemade millionaire’s slice (thanks @ Denise), I’m casting my mind back to the day I first met Sarah Simpson – then managing director of Century One – in late summer 2021. It was the start of a journey that merged three brands – CPL, Century One and Cabbells – to form CPL One Group.
Those first few meetings between CPL managing director Mike Sewell, Sarah and I felt a bit like business dating. Could we work together? Did we have similar values? Would our combined companies form a good team? Would we end up with a stronger business model? Having just survived Covid, were both parties ready for more upheaval?
We decided the answer to the questions above was ‘yes’ and set an initial deadline of March 2022 to conclude a deal. Throughout the next few months, we carried out due diligence on each other’s companies, filled in endless legal paperwork, created dozens of spreadsheets and started working on a new shared vision. March 2022 became June 2022 and, at the very beginning of July 2022, we joined forces. That’s when the real work began…
I set to work meeting my new colleagues, travelling weekly to St Albans and asking lots of questions about how the finances worked, how the processes operated, and trying to get to grips with a whole lot of new client acronyms.
Fairly quickly, we started to merge the back office systems and HR set-up. This was a tall order, and involved a good bit of change management. Thankfully, my new colleagues were pretty patient, even while many of their systems changed completely.
The next step was developing our two brands – Cabbells, which specialises in the arts and heritage sector, and CPL One, which focuses on membership, racing and breeding, corporates and not-for-profits. This was something that could be left in the safe hands of our marketing team and the results, launched in 2023, were really striking.
Throughout, we’ve worked on aligning our cultures, and that’s something we continue to pay attention to as it’s much less black and white than the systems we use. Reassuringly, in our latest opinion survey, our employee engagement level sits at 77% – above average for our sector – so it seems we’re doing something right.
Over the past three years since the creation of CPL One Group, we’ve said goodbye to some colleagues, and welcomed some new ones. We’re now working on our new five-year strategy from 2026 to 2030. There’s always plenty to do, particularly with new challenges and opportunities (think AI for starters) that we had hardly even conceived of back in 2021.
However, it is also the final formal milestone in what has been a three-year journey to bring together two businesses to create a single, multi-million pound group that is in good shape to offer a creative, flexible and ever-evolving service to clients for many years to come.
This journey hasn’t been without its challenges, but on a personal and professional level, it’s also been fun and fulfilling. I’m very glad that, following our first ‘date’ back in 2021, we decided to go ahead.
