“Success leaves clues”: How one founder rebuilt her company's culture

Kate Lester built Diamond Logistics in an industry that made no secret of its misogyny. Decades later, running the business she calls ‘the baby’, a network of 40 service centres spanning same-day, overnight and international e-commerce fulfilment, she had an uncomfortable realisation of her own: her company had the same diversity problem she had once been on the receiving end of.

The reckoning

At the dawn of the 2010s, Lester’s children had grown up and headed off to university, giving her a renewed interest in scaling the company. On the agenda: tech and the composition, culture and ethics of the business.

“I spent an awful lot of time sitting in that mission and values,” Lester recalls. “Originally, I was the same as everybody else. I just thought it was a bit of sort of corporate tokenism. It was when I was starting to work with our team that I realised how undiverse we were.”

When she founded the business in 1992 in her early 20s, she experienced misogyny in an industry that was notorious for it – now she was staring at the fact that she too was part of the problem. “That was really hard to acknowledge, particularly as a woman-led business,” she says. “But success leaves clues.”

A morphing of the business and dynamics of the people within it ensued. Today, Diamond Logistics has a majority female board, along with a 55/45 split of male to female employees – no mean feat as estimates show that the logistics sector as a whole has a male-to-female ratio of 4/1.

Since then, the company has released its proprietary platform Despatchlab, which offers a complete end-to-end solution from order management to warehousing and delivery. The development of which, Lester says, would not be possible without input from a diverse range of people.

Diamond’s partnership model provided an early success indicator for Lester and her teams’ values and culture transformation efforts. While doing site visits to build the workflow of Despatchlab, members of the software team began reporting back that network partners’ were ‘more Diamond than Diamond’.

“That to me just said it all,” says Lester. “One of our core values is shared success. I genuinely believe you could cut off the arm of most of the people in our network and ‘shared success’ would be round it like a stick of rock. Our success is connected to the success of our network partners. Their success is connected to the success of their clients.”

Making age diversity work

Age diversity is a particular focus at Diamond. The company has employees ranging from 18 or 19 years old through to their mid-50s and one of the tricks that businesses are missing out on, according to Lester. “I think the energy, enthusiasm and ease of tech adaptation are great in a younger employee,” she says. “But twin that with the experience that we've got from us older people and I think that's the magic.”

Benefits can be felt in working patterns too, especially in a company that runs 24/7. While some employees may be at the stage in life where they have to do school runs, for example, a patchwork of different ages, responsibilities and life commitments has made Diamond more flexible and dynamic.

However, this amalgamation of the generations isn’t without its friction. Lester says you just have to become comfortable with being uncomfortable but also be laser-focused on recruiting based on your values. Diamond has three core values: shared success, being a great company to work for, trust and belong to, and Diamond delivers.

“The values call themselves out now,” says Lester. “My team will go, ‘well, I don't think that's a very Diamond value thing to do’. And that's good. That shows the power of them and shows that they're going in.”

What can leaders learn?

Audit your own culture before you defend it. Lester's turning point wasn't external pressure, it was admitting her assumptions were wrong. Founders scaling fast rarely have time to check their own blind spots, but that's exactly when they compound.

Values only work if your team enforces them, not you. Diamond's culture shift stuck because staff now self-police against the values (“that's not a very Diamond thing to do”), not because leadership kept reminding them.

Diversity of age is as strategic as diversity of anything else. Lester pairs younger employees' tech fluency with older employees' experience deliberately. It's a recruitment lens most founders overlook.