How I built my business around a simple belief: Martin Wallis-Keyworth
For more than two decades, my career was built around transformation. I led international programmes, redesigned businesses and processes, and worked across countries and sectors. I learned to enter complex organisations, identify what was failing and create something better.
Then, in 2013, transformation became personal. I left corporate life and began again. Between 2013 and 2015, I trained and qualified as a barber. I then worked in Manchester and Chesterfield, learning the profession from the shop floor and understanding a business built on individual skill, trust, consistency and customer relationships. That period was not a pause between careers. It was the beginning of a personal and professional reinvention. I had spent years transforming organisations and processes; now I was transforming myself.
In 2017, I turned that transformation into entrepreneurship by establishing LTZ Barbers. I moved from leading change within organisations supported by established systems to building a business from the ground up. There was no department to absorb each problem, no inherited process to follow and no certainty that the next decision would succeed.
What began as a barbering business developed into something broader, spanning barbering, training and education. In 2025, that evolution was formalised through the creation of LTZ Group, providing structure for the businesses and their long-term ambitions.
I built the business around a simple belief: no individual or organisation should be written off before their potential has been properly understood. Entrepreneurship tested whether I was prepared to apply that belief to myself.
It taught me that resilience is not simply enduring pressure. It is the willingness to question yourself, learn and keep moving when the outcome remains uncertain.
It also changed how I think about leadership. I do not want to build an organisation that depends upon me. I want to develop people who can think independently, make sound decisions, accept responsibility and lead confidently.
That requires more than delegation. It requires expectations, governance, honest communication and the courage to confront behaviours that restrict progress.
Leadership is not demonstrated by what people agree to in meetings. It is demonstrated by what happens afterwards: ownership, accountability, consistency, transparency, collaboration and delivery.
Those principles now shape LTZ Group’s leadership culture. The aim is not simply to create managers who preserve the organisation, but leaders who can question it, improve it and eventually take it further than I could alone.
My transformation has continued through learning. I returned to formal education, completed advanced leadership qualifications and began developing my proposed doctoral research. That research explores what I describe as Institutional Cognitive Suppression: the gradual loss of coherent organisational understanding caused by silos, layered governance, disconnected change and competing priorities. The concept emerged from decades observing why some transformation succeeds while other change merely adds complexity.
For me, doctoral study is not about acquiring another title. It is about transforming experience into evidence and practical thinking that may help organisations understand themselves and make better decisions.
Martin Wallis-Keyworth is an entrepreneur