17 years running River might sound like a long time. But it’s been a journey of start-up insecurity, a management buyout, pivoting from a creative agency to a software company, going bald, ecstatic celebration, sleepless nights and building scalable software products – all driven by our purpose of making great days at work for as many people as possible.

We may have reinvented ourselves at River, but what was true on day 1, is still true today. Be overwhelmingly positive, work hard, try new things with no fear of failure – and always be learning.

I love what I do, but I couldn’t do this without being healthy and mindful. It’s such a simple hack that helps me deal with anything that comes my way. If I was to give one piece of advice – give yourself a power hour every day and look after body and mind. The return on that small investment in time is significant.

Helping to keep our customers’ employees happy, motivated and engaged is the priority for the comms team at River; providing tailored comms which complement our social, reward and recognition software, Rippl. Before joining River in 2018, ‘employee engagement’ wasn’t something I’d ever really encountered. Employed work was simply an exchange of monthly duties for monthly cash.

I joined River in 2017 as the technical lead of a development team responsible for delivering a BI offering to Jaguar Land Rover. A large BI offering with multiple stakeholders made it a challenging but rewarding start to my River career.

Now as the Head of BI Development I am responsible for the technical direction of our BI product (Loop) which although in its infancy is really starting to take off with potential customers. As part of my role I also maintain relationships with our other BI development teams to provide support and guidance to them as and when needed.

There has never been a dull moment in River since I joined in 2017 as a Senior Client Manager looking after JLR Europe. After rolling out their global programme across Europe, I moved to Head of Sales and Marketing where I get to be at the front end of our exciting products and shout about them.

I have a huge passion for people so meeting new clients is an absolute favourite thing to do and mix that with the awesome bunch I work with is just great! I am always game for trying new things, finding different ways to engage with people as well as known as a bit of a chatter box so (fortunately) my role lets me embrace this.

I joined River in 2013 following a management buyout. I oversee the finance team and I am responsible for financial reporting, forecasting, planning & analysis. I enjoy the varied nature of my job and working with a great team who are dedicated to producing informative financial information.

I started working with my River team back in 1997; on my first day as an apprentice at a small West London agency, Phil Dunk, Claire West and Nicky Dunk were already in situ and our journey really began all the way back there together. It could have gone very differently however, as MI5 were doing a huge recruitment campaign about a year into my apprenticeship. My bosses needed to be interviewed as part of the application process but they said no! That was the end of my short-lived desire to be the next Moneypenny.

My apprenticeship led me on to enjoy a varied career path that has spanned most teams across our business; I still retain a close working relationship with one of our original River clients – Mercedes-Benz Vans – which keeps me close to our Rippl product and its success.

I started working for River before I was really supposed to. When River was a start-up and had its first few small but enthusiastic clients,I would spend my evenings producing performance reports as well as having a day job and newborn baby!

Having worked in every part of River I can support any team that needs help and an eye for attention to detail.

My journey with River began in 2003 – I was employee number 2 after Phil Dunk who I’d worked with for 9 years in a London-based agency. At the time I joined as a Senior Account Manager running our first two client programmes. In the past 16 years I’ve held pretty much every role in the business and so when needed can turn my hand to most things (with the exception of software development – we have a large team of talented experts for that!)

I work with a great team of data specialists who are responsible for importing, cleaning and transforming our clients’ data to provide accurate figures for our BI platforms. I’ve worked at River since 2012 and it’s great to see the transformation of the business and our software over that time, but the best thing about working at River is the people!

I joined River many moons ago (in 2007!), and initially looked after one of our biggest reward and recognition programmes, for our Jaguar Land Rover Client. My love of software and data led me to focus on the Business Intelligence side of River, and I have helped to grow and develop this side of the business over the past 10 years.

I am now responsible for the Business Intelligence Division at River and together with a brilliant team of people, look after our wonderful Clients, products, and strategy. I love meeting new Clients, hearing about their challenges and discovering ways in which us and our products can help them, which is lucky as this is what I do every day.

As the MD of Engagement my remit is to help guide and support the client services and technical teams at River. I have a passion for helping people work together as the best software is always built collaboratively. The thing I enjoy most about my job is helping people to achieve their potential. Seeing young apprentices take on responsibility and watching them learn and grow has been particularly rewarding.

One of my favourite quotes is ‘strong opinions, weakly held’ which is something I always encourage; it’s great to be passionate about your opinion but your current position shouldn’t prevent you from being open to new ideas.

I joined River in 2017, after nearly two decades building software for a wide variety of businesses, ranging from e-commerce websites to large scale BI and data analytics systems, and quickly found myself working on a broad range of projects. I see software architecture as being the responsibility of all developers, not just someone with “Architect” in their job title.

As such, my role is to work within development teams, helping them to deliver high quality solutions for our clients while sharing best practices and guiding technical strategy across the entire company. Working at River gives me a fantastic opportunity to help solve some tricky business problems while passing on what I’ve learned over the years, and to learn a bit more every day.