Alex Hirst

Lizzie Penny and Alex Hirst are friends, entrepreneurs, and changemakers. Lizzie has three young children, lives in Bristol, and has recently recovered from breast cancer. Alex suffered from debilitating burnout, before starting a family and leaving London for a village in rural Oxfordshire. Together they came up with the concept of workstyle (in the pub) in response to their negative experiences of a 9-5 traditional working week. Workstyle is a new word to describe the complete freedom to choose when and where you work. They co-founded now multi-million pound social enterprise Hoxby in 2014 to test and prove the concept of workstyle and have since helped thousands of workstylers around the world to set, project and respect their own workstyles. They have set up their own longitudinal research study into the link between autonomy, productivity and wellbeing and have delivered projects for some of the biggest businesses in the world including Unilever, Amazon, AIA, and Merck. Forbes.com have described them as ‘creating the freelance revolution 3.0’ and they have been featured in the FT, Times, Telegraph, Stylist, Marie Claire, Metro and The Guardian, among others. Between them they have been shortlisted for awards by the Institute of Directors, Social Enterprise UK, the RSA and the National Business Women’s Awards as well as being awarded ‘Top 50 advocates for equality in Marketing & Media’ by DIMA, and the #WorkThatWorks Award at the Women In Marketing awards. Everything they do is in pursuit of having a positive impact on the world through changing the way people work.