CEO on leaving corporate career to start £1.6m Belfast company: ‘I remember feeling sick before I handed my notice in’

When Louise Doyle and Steph Scholes founded their corporate gifting business, they set out to challenge the conventional approach to employee and client rewards, turning a practice often treated as an afterthought into a tool for building stronger business relationships.

The idea grew out of their own experience. Over eight years working together in the travel industry, the pair helped grow the company’s turnover to more than £15m while achieving its highest-ever staff retention rate, demonstrating the commercial value of putting people first.

Speaking to Cathy Martin on the Belfast Telegraph’s In Good Company podcast, Louise explains how that philosophy inspired the business, the challenges of building a company from scratch, and why making people feel valued remains central to its growth ambitions.

In their previous roles, Louise and Steph went beyond the expected, sourcing thoughtful gifts for colleagues and sending personalised care packages to clients before and after major trips. Their approach was built on a simple principle: investing in people pays dividends. They believed it could deliver even greater results if they built a business around it.

“We used to spend a lot of our time just searching the internet for little gifts and things that would make people feel valued and appreciated,” Louise recalls. “We had this real itch to sort of say: ‘Imagine if we could do this our way.’”

Turning that idea into reality meant leaving behind successful corporate careers and building a business from the ground up. Louise, who was a global sales director at the time, admits the decision was daunting.

“I still remember feeling sick, like physically sick and sweaty, before I handed my notice in.” 

After researching the market and developing a business plan, Louise and Steph recognised they needed technical expertise to turn their idea into a scalable business. They enrolled in Silicon Valley-based Founder Institute’s Tech Accelerator, completing the programme online while learning about everything from customer journeys and payment systems to attracting investment. They graduated as the programme’s top founders.

Their original vision was a direct-to-consumer website where people could find gifts for friends and family. Early customers included friends and relatives, and the model gave the pair valuable insight into consumer preferences and helped them build relationships with independent suppliers offering distinctive products.

However, it was their first major corporate client, Intuit, the company behind QuickBooks, that helped reveal the greater potential of the business-to-business market and prompted Needi to evolve its offering into the personalised concierge service it operates today.

Now working with clients ranging from global brands to local businesses, Needi sources tailored merchandise, gifts and experiences through a network of independent suppliers, with an emphasis on personalisation and sustainability. Having grown revenue from around £500,000 to £1.6m, the company is pursuing further expansion, with ambitions to become the go-to provider for businesses worldwide before extending its reach to individual consumers.

Louise, who is originally from Devon but now based in Co Armagh, believes too many companies still take a one-size-fits-all approach, buying the same thing for everyone without considering whether the recipient will actually want it. At Needi, the aim is to get to know the person behind the present and find something they will appreciate, rather than something that ends up unused or thrown away.

The company has sourced everything from personalised merchandise to extraordinary gifts for high-profile individuals. One such project involved a bespoke sculpture of a person’s favourite dog, measuring twice its life-size. Other requests have involved urgent international deliveries, elaborate surprises and experiences at five-star hotels.

Needi’s gifting platform also allows recipients to choose their own present from a curated selection. Employees receive a small branded gift and a QR code linking to the platform, where a video message from their CEO introduces the options. For the 39-year-old entrepreneur, it combines personal choice with the ability to deliver thoughtful gifts at scale.

Louise also believes these gestures are becoming more significant as digital communication increasingly dominates business relationships.

“The more AI is prevalent within communication, the more things like a little gift and a handwritten note stand out so much more than it ever has before.”

Needi’s people-first philosophy extends to its own workforce. With many of its nine-strong team balancing work with young families, Needi’s fully remote model offers flexibility that reflects Louise’s own experience of raising three children while building the business. However, she acknowledges that maintaining a company culture centred on human connection is more challenging when colleagues rarely meet in person.

“We’re growing a business that believes hugely in human connection and making people feel valued, yet we’re fully remote. That’s hard. It means that we have to actually do what we’re helping other companies do and get together and support each other and do things that count.”

The partnership between Louise and Steph has also been central to the business’s development, with their complementary strengths helping them to navigate the competing demands of building.

Despite the pressures of growing a company, the pair remain passionate about its potential, and their challenge now is to turn that early success into a business with an international reach, without losing sight of the idea that inspired Needi in the first place.