Sue Ryder Southern Women of Achievement Awards 2019.

Nominated by team members Ruby Narbrough and Hilary Wilson for co-founding and managing Kiss House, the judges commended Carli for the ‘innovative business idea and approach’, plus her work on ‘developing the scalability of Kiss House’. They noted how she’s successfully overcome ‘adversity and obstacles’, as well as being actively involved in charity work.  They were particularly impressed by her strength and fortitude in establishing Kiss House whilst managing a chronic pain condition.

When interviewed Carli said “I was very surprised and thoroughly delighted to win the award! I love working on Kiss House, it’s a dream project and I feel like everything else I’ve done has been for this. As a team we’re driven by a common purpose to enhance and improve lives, by creating exceptional living spaces that put people, quality and the environment first.”

“It’s the knowledge that we’re doing something important that motivates me, despite being in pain and working with such a great team keeps me going. Chronic pain impacts all areas of my life and I’ve had to make a lot of significant adjustments. The beauty of doing something like Kiss House is that you can write your own rule book. I think this helps make us be more open as a company and more willing to try different things.”

Kiss House having a female managing director is certainly evidence of doing things differently — women are hugely under-represented in the construction sector, particularly in senior roles. The recent gender pay gap report cited construction as having the biggest disparity in pay between men and women of all UK industries.

“We’re proud that 75% of our team at Kiss House HQ is female and 50% of the wider team — very unusual for the construction industry. We hope that as we grow we can continue to bring greater diversity to our team and to ensure that women are well represented.

“We’ll be looking for new people for several roles in the near future” said Carli. “We’re poised to launch 6 new house designs with new customer choice options, a new website and a brand new look. The last year has been extremely intense and exciting, we went really deep — interrogating everything to work out how we can do our best work and have the biggest impact. This is what being purpose-driven is all about. It’s very motivating to see that there are more and more companies whose first priority is to make the world a better place. Our re-brand and launch are the result of all of this and opens a very exciting next chapter for us. We’ll have a series of announcements over the coming weeks and are incredibly excited to enter this next phase, to do the best we can and be a positive influence.”