How Visual Storytelling and Habit-Based Learning Drive Lasting Culture Change In Organizations – with Si Beales from Sidedoor Studio

In a recent episode of the HR business marketing podcast, A Better HR Business, Ben and his guest, Si Beales, Founder/Learning Director at Sidedoor Studio talk about how to attract HR clients with visual storytelling and habit-based learning.

Si Beales is a trainer, speaker, and academic at Leeds School of Art & Design and Leeds Beckett University. He’s also the founder of Sidedoor Studio.

He works with businesses, students, and creative teams to build practical human skills—like thinking, collaboration, and curiosity—and turn them into habits that actually stick.

Through Sidedoor Studio, he creates learning experiences using video, workshops, and events, helping organisations make their training more engaging and useful.

His focus is simple: make learning clearer, more relevant, and easier to apply in the real world. Si has worked with organisations including Nike, Carlsberg, Boots, E.ON, and Central Saint Martins. With a background across industry and academia, he brings a practical, straightforward approach—focused on ideas people can actually use.

You’ll hear practical strategies for marketing for HR consultants, using storytelling to stand out as a consultant, and shaping learning experiences that stick. Whether you identify as HR, workplace, L&D, OD, recruitment, or people & culture, you’ll discover real stories and actionable advice to attract clients, win contracts, and grow sustainably.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• How habit-based learning and visual storytelling can make training and onboarding more impactful
• Why authentic, relevant content engages learners and drives real culture change
• Si Beals’ approach to finding the right clients (and why working with SMEs brings agility and creative freedom)

• Sidedoor Studio website: www.sidedoor.studio
• Si Beales’ website: www.sibeales.com
• Si Beales’ LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/si-beales

Scroll down for the video version and the transcript.

Ok, onto the show!

Interview – How Visual Storytelling and Habit-Based Learning Drive Lasting Culture Change In Organizations with Si Beales

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About The ‘A Better HR Business’ Podcast

In my HR marketing podcast, I talk with different HR consultants and HR tech companies from around the world to learn about what they do and how they keep their businesses healthy and moving in the right direction.

If you have questions you want to ask me about growing an HR consultancy or marketing for HR tech companies, just let me know or visit the HR marketing services page.

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Enjoy the show!

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Episode Transcript

Episode 307: How Visual Storytelling and Habit-Based Learning Drive Lasting Culture Change In Organizations – with Si Beales

Ben Geoghegan [00:00:28]:
Hello, welcome back to the show. Great to have you along and I’m really looking forward to today’s conversation with Si Beales. Si is a fascinating guy. He’s based in beautiful Nottingham and he is the founder of a very cool company called Sidedoor Studio. And they connect visual storytelling with learning design to help people to upskill and businesses to perform better. So it’s about creating learning that feels relevant, authentic and engaging. And they work with well known brands like Carlsberg, Britvic on day one inductions and so on. Si Beales, he combines his experience as a brand marketer and visual storyteller with expertise as a senior academic at leading universities.

We’re going to get into all of that in just a moment, but firstly, Si, thanks so much for joining me today.

Si Beales [00:01:14]:
Oh, hi. Thanks there. Lovely to be here.

Ben Geoghegan [00:01:16]:
So, yeah, I gave a quick snapshot, but let’s start with Sidedoor Studio. Do you want to tell us what it is and what does Sidedoor Studio do?

Si Beales [00:01:23]:
I think it’s kind of almost a happy coincidence of a number of different things. My background is marketing. I’ve always just been interested in storytelling and persuasion and sales. And so I had a marketing business for quite a while. I worked for, you know, different media organizations for a while. I kind of weirdly got into the fashion industry and then I ended up being an academic teaching marketing. And I think all those things kind of came together where I realized kind of towards the end of my time at various different universities, I just felt that a lot of it didn’t work. A lot of learning didn’t work.

So when I was at university or lecturing I had various roles but I was kind of principal lecturer in different things mainly in marketing. I kind of got this idea. I’ve always liked frameworks, so I’ve always liked simplifying things, demystifying things. And part of my role was to try and do some research. So I just came up with this soft skills framework and tried to develop that. Over the last, I think year, what we’ve realized really is that we focus on the B2B as the agency. So what we believe is that a lot of corporate training, learning and development, upskilling—whatever you want to call it—doesn’t work largely because it’s very much from the top down. It’s very imposed, doesn’t feel very personal.

We were lucky. About a year and a half ago we got a Creative Catalyst grant from Innovate UK and that allowed us to do some research into learning and how people learn and what they feel about it. And out of that kind of really came the idea that a couple of things, but very much about habit-based learning. Essentially we focus things on soft skills, or I call them human skills, and habit-based learning. But also we’re very big on helping people learn how to learn. We try and help people and organizations fulfill their potential and we do that by reconnecting with their human skills and by developing habits that build lifelong learning. So how can you help people genuinely be conscious, observant, challenge, ask questions? How do you create content that does that? And I think that’s where the marketing stuff comes in which is about telling stories and making it engaging, and then the learning, the pedagogy, heutagogy stuff comes in which is like, how do you make this stick?

Ben Geoghegan [00:03:37]:
It’s a good one though because I’ve seen all manners of learning, development, corporate culture change and so on. And so I’ve definitely seen the Let’s stick up some posters and have a town hall meeting where the CEO tells everyone thou shalt do this and thou shalt do that. And I’ve done safety audits which was about making sure that workplaces are safe. But really all you’re doing is going around trying to catch someone doing the wrong thing and filling in a form for that, which is terrible way to do culture change. So it sounds like your approach at Sidedoor Studio is around—you mentioned the word persuasion and influence and making things stick—it’s around getting mindset and cultural change that people understand but they want to do and continue doing. Is that right?

Si Beales [00:04:18]:
I like frameworks and models. You know, I think there’s this saying that all models are wrong, but some of them are useful. So I developed this model called PEARS. Essentially it’s: Prepare, Engage, Apply, Reflect, Strengthen. And I started to use it with some of my students, and we started to use it in some of the content that we’re creating. So basically, if you relate that to an individual, unless you prepare to learn and you decide that you want to learn—and you’re motivated and you understand why you’re doing it and why it matters to you—you’re not really going to learn. The brain is designed to forget, so in order to create good learning, you’ve got to create learning that goes deep. And for it to go deep, it has to feel personal, authentic, and it has to matter to you.

So the preparing bit, for example, of PEARS is: people don’t go to the gym and not warm up and just start. But in learning we just go—bam. You know, to understand, say for example with prepare: why does this matter to you? What does success look like? How are you going to be able to use it? If you do a very simple little thing like free writing, or you do some kind of motivational statement or whatever, the brain will kind of go, okay, this is important—let’s sit up and take some notice.

So the next part of that is engage. How do you learn as individuals? We all learn in different ways, and yet we have one-size-fits-all, which doesn’t work. So the engage part of it is: how do you learn best and how are you going to make this have meaning to you? Do you like to cram stuff and then come back and revisit it? Do you like to learn in little chunks? Do you like to do it like this and then…

Then apply is how you’re going to use it. Reflect is how you’re going to remember it and retain it, and reflect on it, and then bring it back when you need it.

And then the last one is S, which is strengthen—how you’re going to build on this so it becomes habit-based: lifelong learning, peer learning, mentors, that kind of thing. The half-life of hard skills is declining massively, and AI is obviously massively involved. Soft skills stay with you forever. So if you’re curious, or you’re observant, or you’ve got good critical thinking, or you know how to collaborate, those work anywhere.

So, for example, to give you a real-world example: with one of our companies, what we’re doing is we’re using a drone, but it’s first-person view. So basically it seems like you’re flying through the space, because if you then show somebody in a high-vis jacket, you’re immediately thinking that that’s them, not you. Then you come to a hotspot and there’s a problem, or a scenario, or something needs to be explained, or there’s a process. In that case we use interactivity and motion graphics, because then it’s about problem-solving, gamifying it—you’re engaged in it, you’re involved.

Ben Geoghegan [00:07:02]:
The drone example is a good one because we’ve all seen corporate videos where you’re looking at someone in a high-vis jacket. And it’s about them and what they do—and oh no, what an idiot, they’re not looking out for that forklift, whatever it is—but you’re not putting yourself in their shoes. So the drone switches it around and puts you in their shoes, and you experience what’s going on. I’m curious, who would be your ideal clients or customers, and for what sort of use cases or situations?

Si Beales [00:07:28]:
We do work with some bigger companies, but we tend to focus on companies that I would say are still SMEs, but they’re kind of like, you know, maybe 10 to 50 million—that’s still an SME. But actually we’re doing a project in a couple of weeks with an organization that is relatively small, and we’re doing some kind of shadowing of health and safety work. But then we’re essentially trying to turn the physical into digital in an interesting way.

And we also have two sides. We’ve got the external side—so we do a lot of promotions, recruitment videos, primers, almost like the little thing you have on your website, kind of like “this is what we do in 60 seconds,” almost like a video elevator pitch. And actually that often is what gets us into clients—by having the more marketing-focused work. And then when we get in, they kind of realize that actually there are probably other needs within.

It tends to go one way or the other. So I think from the aspect of talking about getting more business, we either go in and we’re like a marketing agency that helps them do promotional communication and brand work, or we go in and we’re like an L&D agency who does training, upskilling, and events, and that kind of thing.

But also, like I was saying, we’re now targeting people who are just much more able to make decisions much more quickly. Working with large organizations can take a year, whereas we’re going to people who are essentially going, “Okay, we’ve got a board of directors, we know there’s a need, we know we’re having issues with recruitment or retention or upskilling or promotion or whatever. This isn’t going to cost that much to start us off—let’s go for it.” Then you build it from there, and it’s much more fluid.

The other thing is that you’re not ending up with creativity by committee. If they trust us, we can come up with a creative solution—we’re not imposing it on them, we’re trying to work out the solution together. Recently, for some reason, a lot of people almost want to create mini dramas or stories or whatever. That can be good, but it can also be dreadful—if you do that badly, it can be really bad. So it’s like, how can we do this in a way that fulfills your vision and solves your problem, but at the same time, we as storytellers—and also from a technical perspective, filming it, lighting it, motion graphics, animation, whatever it is—how can we make that work?

I think a lot of it for me is about collaborating with our clients. And I put a huge amount of emphasis on the context and the research. So, say for example, a number of our clients—we’re doing health and safety—I want to go on the courses, I want to go on the existing ones, I want to shadow people, I want to get in the truck or on the forklift. I want to be there on the ground to understand them as an audience and what they engage with.

We’ve got one client who has a lot of people on the road—it’s like, well, let’s make a radio station for them.

And also, I really believe in social learning. I don’t believe in formal learning so much. So this is not going to be “radio station: learn to do this.” It’s going to be like, okay, here are some stories, here are people who’ve been through it—but also it’s going to be entertainment and engagement. You know, it’s going to be like—you want to hear from Doris the tea lady, why she’s been at the company for 30 years. It’s stories.

Ben Geoghegan [00:10:40]:
And I’ve experienced this myself through the HR consultancy years ago, of going for big companies and there’ll be big projects and stuff, but yeah, it’ll take 12 months and oh yeah, we pay on 90 days or more.

But having made that switch to smaller organizations that can move faster and stuff—that’s one thing to say, yeah, we’re going to go for them. How do you actually find them from a sales and marketing perspective? How do you get in front of them and start those conversations?

Si Beales [00:11:05]:
So it’s been brilliant for us. And I was very skeptical because I’d been along to a few breakfasts a few years ago at the East Midlands Chamber of Commerce, and they’re actually the largest in the UK. They have so many summits—they have manufacturing, advanced skills, employment practice, law—they’re brilliant. The policy team there, the president there— I’ve got to know them a bit—they genuinely care about business and about supporting people to get new business. So I think that’s been a really good one.

I guess the thing that we’re actually moving away from is things like social media marketing so much. We tried and tried and tried to get new business through LinkedIn, and we just don’t really get it. I think that we are going to treat LinkedIn more as social media rather than just a business tool.

I have, again, another framework I developed, which is this thing called the “Three I’s.” So I talk about insight, innovation, and inspiration. So basically I want our content to have one of those things. I want it to give something, add value. I don’t want it to just be “I am here, listen to me.”

Increasingly, what we’re doing actually is more things like putting on quite a lot of events. I really like puns for some reason. So in Nottingham there’s a phrase called “Ay up me duck.” We just put a series of events called “AI Up Me Duck,” which is basically about the creative industries and what’s happening with AI. We’ve started another one which we actually call Sidedoor Social. We had open submissions—we very much said it’s show-and-tell passion projects. It’s not commercial, it’s just whatever stage you’re at.

But that really worked for us. Within three weeks we got 10,000 views on our Instagram just for this one thing we set up. And Beau, who I work with—who’s a designer—he got 26,000 on his own.

I think my advice, in many ways—and this is why I like to disrupt stuff—is just make things that are interesting, that people engage with, and just see what happens.

Ben Geoghegan [00:13:02]:
You talk about the chambers of commerce, which are everywhere, so people listening to this will find that interesting. You do a lot of things, you’ve got a lot of different angles. Do you have an elevator pitch? Because those sorts of situations—you’re moving, you’re mingling—you’ve got a minute to say something. What do you do?

Si Beales [00:13:16]:
I think the main thing really is it’s about creating content that helps people fulfill their potential, and through that, businesses perform better. And the way we do that is primarily we use video, we use audio—visual storytelling. It’s basically that idea of how do you get somebody to care? If they don’t care, it’s not going to stick. You’ve got to get the hook at the beginning just to get them to pay attention, and then you’ve got to keep them, and then you’ve got to try to get them engaged and involved—and that’s all storytelling.

But also you’ve got to mix that with doing something they may well feel resistant to, which is learning and changing. But if you have those human skills, then you’ll be much more fit for purpose than if you’ve just learned something that is going to be replaced by AI fairly soon.

Ben Geoghegan [00:14:12]:
That makes sense. For people who are listening to this who might be running either an L&D consulting firm or an HR-related consultancy, what would be your advice on how to market or grow their business from a marketing perspective?

Si Beales [00:14:26]:
One of the things that we realized through the East Midlands Chamber of Commerce is there’s a lot of business on your doorstep. You know, we’re in Nottingham and we naturally think that the money is in London or down south or whatever, but we realized there’s a lot of people within the Midlands. You know, there’s a lot of business there—it’s just how you get through the door.

I don’t love networking events when they’re a bit naff, but actually just going along to things and engaging with people—and I think particularly for younger people as well—just being brave, just walking up to somebody and going, “Hey, I see you do this, I do that.” It’s about how you start that conversation.

So digitally, I think it has to be—you’ve got to say interesting things, or you’ve got to connect with people in a way that matters to them. In person, I think it’s about listening to people, trying to understand, trying to connect—not necessarily being out there just to sell to them, but just being interested in what they do. It’s reconnecting with being human and recognizing that—even though it’s a cliché about HR and business—it is about people and how you connect with people.

But also, just go local, start small. Because if you identify people who are small but growing, and you grow with them, then your business will grow. We’ve got a number of people now who we’re starting to work with who are actually scaling quite quickly—and then we’ll scale with them.

Ben Geoghegan [00:15:48]:
I like that. It’s good advice. If people want to learn more about you or about Sidedoor Studio, what should they do next?

Si Beales [00:15:54]:
So, www.sidedoor.studio is our website, and my personal one is www.sibeales.com. So what we tend to do is—for the agency, that’s through Sidedoor Studio, and for things like workshops, it’s through www.sibeales.com.

Ben Geoghegan [00:16:08]:
All right, so if you’re listening to this on the go, check the show notes—but we’ll have the Sidedoor Studio website there, and then www.sibeales.com, right?

So they’ll be in there and I’ll put your LinkedIn profile there in case people want to connect there. But otherwise fantastic. I love what you’ve done and I love the different approach to make corporate learning, engagement, upskilling of the workforce much more interesting. Engaging and sticking sticky. Wonderful. Love what you do. Thank you so much for sharing your story today, Si.

Si Beals [00:16:36]:
Really, really great to speak to you. Yeah, it’s brilliant.

Topics covered: how to attract HR consulting clients, marketing for HR consultants, workplace consultants, L&D consultants, how to stand out as a consultant

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