Cheryl Calverley and Paul Billingsley

About Cheryl Calverley and Paul Billingsley

Cheryl Calverley and Paul Billingsley are leaders of the #IRLrevolution and founders of THE DEN. Long-term colleagues and firm friends, we’ve spent our lives to date leading pretty mainstream businesses doing pretty mainstream things. Paul is Managing Director of an advertising agency best known for creating the annual John Lewis Christmas ad, and Cheryl is CEO of an e-commerce mattress business best known for championing the mental health benefits of sleep. We had started to experience a dramatic decline in the mental health and social confidence of the young people joining our businesses. Increasingly, we saw our teams unhappy in conversation, intimidated by collaboration, and fearful of face-to-face debate. We were also both parents of children on the cusp of teenagerdom, and it became abundantly clear that the issues we were witnessing in our young employees were sown in their teenage years. We decided enough was enough. And, as two people who’ve never been scared to go out and make an impact on the world, we decided to do something about it. So we threw in our jobs. And the rest is history (in the making)…