Moving on

After 10 years, one of our founding Directors Helen Palmer has made the difficult decision to leave CTConsults at the end of September.

With full support from the team at CTConsults, Helen has chosen to step aside so that she can concentrate on working more directly with the cultural sector and to build on her 15 years working as one half of Palmer Squared, a marketing and audience development consultancy established with her brother Andrew. This will include working with the outdoor arts experts Walk the Plank on their major, once in a lifetime Festival UK* 2022 commission – Green Space, Dark Skies.

Helen commented: ‘It’s been an extraordinary 10 years as part of a great team working to build CTConsults into the agency it is today. I’ve been lucky to work in some amazing destinations with clients across the UK and overseas. But it’s now time for me to focus on what really brings me joy and that’s working directly with and as part of the cultural sector to support and enable organisations to engage with a diverse range of audiences to explore creativity in all its forms. I wish the company all the very best for the future, not least because my brother Andrew is still one of the Directors!’

Under Helen’s stewardship alongside founding Directors Alex Saint, Andrew Palmer, Dan Lukas, and Mat Bend, CTConsults has evolved from its initial beginnings focusing on cultural tourism consultancy and its award-winning creativetourist.com what’s on listings site, into a place-based consultancy with key strengths in digital transformation and place branding.

Helen’s highlights of the last 10 years include developing Norfolk and Suffolk’s first cultural tourism strategy which led to increased investment and support for the region’s cultural sector. Amidst many other highlights, she led on creating London’s first cultural tourism strategy which helped to inform the Borough of Culture initiative, supported Bristol and Bath on their collaborative two-city cultural tourism journey, created new visioning strategies for National Museums Northern Ireland’s Ulster Folk Museum and Ulster American Folk Park, and delivered cultural tourism workshops in Denmark, Iceland and the Faroe Islands.

Managing Director Alex Saint said: ‘Helen has been instrumental in CTConsults’ success, and whilst we can’t ever ‘replace’ Helen, big departures always create new opportunities and we are recalibrating as a good business should and seeing this as a moment to create a number of career accelerating roles to bring new talent into our fast-growing business. Already this year we have welcomed 4 new faces to the core team, and we are busy recruiting right now for 3 more.’