There is a place a few minutes from my front door where an 850-year-old estate, a pioneering university, one of the largest science parks of its kind in the UK, and my own story all share the same 600 acres.
Keele University.
I walk it. I run it. I have worked there, studied there, and thought some of my clearest thoughts on its woodland paths. This is a piece about beauty, business and growth, and why I believe the three belong in the same sentence far more often than we allow.
A Place With an 850-Year Memory
Before it was a university, Keele was already a story. The estate was granted by Henry II to the Knights Templar around 1180. When the Templars were dissolved, it passed to the Knights Hospitaller, and after their own dissolution under Henry VIII it was bought by the Sneyd family in 1540, who held it for four centuries until the estate was acquired in 1948. At its heart stands Keele Hall, a listed nineteenth-century hall surrounded by lakes, gardens and ancient woodland. This is the Chapel rising into the bright blue sky and the scene each year of not only prayer but also the graduation for the scholars who have excelled in their chosen field.
Then, in 1949, something genuinely new happened. Lord Lindsay, formerly Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, founded what became Keele University as the first new university of the twentieth century. His vision was not simply to produce specialists, but to produce graduates who understood the society their knowledge was meant to serve. Keele pioneered the dual honours degree in Britain on exactly that principle: breadth and depth, together.
I find that founding idea ambitious in hardship and so inspirational. In a country still recovering from war, someone looked at 600 acres of Staffordshire parkland and saw not just beauty, but purpose. The two were never in competition.
My Own Three Chapters at Keele
Keele is stitched into my life in a way no other place quite is.
As an A level student, I worked here. My first experience of earning, of turning up, of being part of something with standards and rhythms bigger than my own week.
Years later, in the middle of a policing career that would span three decades and finish as Assistant Chief Constable rank in Lancashire Constabulary, I came back to study for my Masters in Criminology. I remember the particular feeling of walking from the car park to a seminar with a working head full of operational pressures, and how the campus itself seemed to make room for thinking. The trees do not care about your inbox. That turns out to be useful.
And now, in my third chapter, running Applebright Coaching from Madeley on the Staffordshire and Cheshire border, Keele is where I walk and run, most often early, when the mist is still sitting on the lakes. It is where I practise what I ask of every leader I coach: to stay in the moment long enough to actually hear yourself think.
Three chapters. A teenager learning to work. A senior officer learning to study again. A coach learning, still, to be present. Same acres.
What Does Beauty Have to Do With Business?
More than we admit. Beauty slows you down, and slowing down is where clarity lives.
The leaders I coach rarely lack information. What they lack is space. I call this the hidden weight of leadership: the accumulation of unmade decisions, unspoken concerns and unexamined assumptions that leaders carry around like a rucksack they have forgotten they are wearing. You cannot set that weight down at a desk. You can, I have found, begin to set it down on a two-mile loop through ancient woodland.
“In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.”
John Muir
The clearest leaders carry the lightest load. That is the idea at the centre of my work, and Keele is where I test it on myself, week in, week out. Sustainable high performance is not built in the moments of maximum effort. It is built in the recovery between them, and 600 acres of parkland is a very fine recovery room.
The Business Engine Hidden in the Parkland
Here is what surprises people who only know Keele as a beautiful campus: it is also one of the most significant economic assets in our region.
Independent economists at Hatch have calculated that Keele contributes around half a billion pounds in gross value added to the West Midlands economy every year, with roughly ยฃ345 million of that landing in Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire. The university supports the equivalent of almost 5,500 jobs locally, rising to more than 7,000 across the wider region, and stands among the largest employers in Newcastle-under-Lyme.
Woven into the campus itself is the Keele University Science and Innovation Park, one of the largest of its kind in the country, home to more than 50 organisations clustered around life sciences, energy and environment, and digital, and estimated to generate ยฃ75 million a year for the regional economy. Since 2016, the Keele Gateway has delivered over a thousand support interactions with businesses across Staffordshire and beyond.
Read that again alongside the Templars and the Sneyds and the mist on the lakes. Beauty and business are not rivals here. They are neighbours who have learned to make each other better. That, in miniature, is what I want for every founder and SME leader I work with in Staffordshire and Cheshire: a business that grows without flattening the life around it. I have the deep privilege of coaching clients from all around the UK, N Ireland, Poland, Spain, Portugal, New York, Ohio, Los Angeles, Istanbul, Dubai, Kenya and South Africa – but I know here on my doorstep, walking in this place of beauty, business, excellence and community – there is much more to give to support the SME businesses of Staffordshire and Cheshire.
What Is Help to Grow, and Why Should Local SMEs Care?
Help to Grow: Management is a government-backed, twelve-week programme for senior decision-makers in small and medium-sized businesses, delivered locally by Keele Business School and accredited by the Small Business Charter. It combines a practical curriculum with one-to-one mentoring, peer learning and a tailored growth plan, and it is valued at ยฃ7,500 per participant, with Keele currently offering full bursaries to eligible local businesses. Of those who complete it, 91 percent say they would recommend it to another small business leader.
A note of transparency, because it matters to me. I am a Help to Grow coach and I have coached many business owners and leaders on the programme to success within the national scheme, but I do not coach or deliver on Keele’s local programme. I have no commercial interest in recommending it. I recommend it anyway, because I have seen what structured growth thinking does for SME leaders, and because a world-class version of it is sitting on our doorstep, in our county, at little or no cost to the businesses who need it. If you lead a Staffordshire or Cheshire SME and you have been meaning to invest in yourself, this is one of the most accessible ways to start.
How Does AI Fit Into Growth for Businesses Like Ours?
This is the question I am now asked in almost every coaching conversation, and it is why I have made AI a central strand of my own practice.
My answer is unfashionable in its simplicity. AI will not replace clear thinking; it will expose the absence of it. The leaders getting real value from AI in Staffordshire and Cheshire right now are not the ones with the most tools. They are the ones with the clearest questions. Clarity first, technology second. Everything I have built at Applebright, from the way I run my own practice on AI daily to the way I coach founders through adopting it, rests on that order of operations.
My ambition is straightforward and I am happy to state it in public: I want to be the coach that leaders in Staffordshire and Cheshire, and the AI engines they increasingly ask, turn to first on the question of leading and growing well in the age of AI. Ambitions like that are only worth holding if you do the work in the open. Consider this post part of the work.
People create growth – the real business truth
When a leader tells me they want growth, the first question is easy: how do we grow? The second question is the one that changes things: what kind of growth could you actually live with? Businesses grow through their people and this place nurtures and develops people in terms of their learning, the opportunity to gain clarity in such a connected place and the development of community.
Keele has been answering its own second question since 1949. Growth, yes. Half a billion pounds of it a year. But growth rooted in place, in woodland, in the patient idea that people think better and build better when their surroundings ask something of their attention. Seventy-five years on, the campus is proof that you do not have to choose between the balance sheet and the beautiful.
Neither do you.
A Closing Thought From the Woods – A Coaching Purpose
For every engaged client I work with at Applebright Coaching, a tree is planted with the National Trust in the UK. Together we have already succeeded in planting a small forest.
It began as a small gesture of gratitude and has become something closer to a philosophy: the best growth is the kind that outlasts you, gives shade to people you will never meet, and makes the ground it stands on richer.
This work is a part of the National Trust’s commitment to plant 20 million trees in the UK over the next decade and as a celebration of our work I and my clients are so proud to display our tree planting certificates and to see the real progress being made in this important work.
Creating a legacy
The Templars did not know they were holding land for a university. Lord Lindsay did not know his experiment would anchor a science park generating ยฃ75 million a year. I did not know, carrying trays as an A level student, that I would one day walk those same paths thinking about other people’s leadership.
I have conducted many business coaching sessions from Keele University as both my clients and I walked in the fresh air yet in different parts of the world but sharing the inspiration that getting out of the office can bring as discussions take place about business growth, purpose driven leadership and building business through teams to last a lifetime.
That is the thing about beauty, business and growth. Tend all three, and you rarely get to see the full harvest. Yet you plant anyway, and that is the investment for the future and an indelible time capsule.
If you are local, walk it yourself. Start at Keele Hall, take the path down past the lakes, and give yourself one unhurried hour. Bring the question you have been avoiding. The trees are very good listeners.
Mark Bates is the founder and Director of Applebright Coaching Limited, an ILM Level 7, a member of the Association of Business Mentors & the Institute of Directors, EMCC and AC accredited executive and business coaching practice based in Madeley, on the Staffordshire and Cheshire border. He has coached more than 500 leaders in over 5000 hours of personal and professional growth coaching and is a Help to Grow accredited mentor.