{"id":47500,"date":"2017-05-22T00:13:41","date_gmt":"2017-05-21T23:13:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/staging.startups.co.uk\/startups-100\/?p=47500"},"modified":"2021-05-18T14:27:18","modified_gmt":"2021-05-18T13:27:18","slug":"15-play-consulting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staging.startups.co.uk\/startups-100\/2017\/15-play-consulting\/","title":{"rendered":"15. Play Consulting"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Founder:<\/strong> Marcus Thornley<br>\n<strong>Founded:<\/strong> March 2014<br>\n<strong>Website:<\/strong> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.play-consult.co.uk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">www.play-consult.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Have you ever looked up from your phone to find you&rsquo;ve spent the last two hours aligning virtual pieces of candy? Or maybe you&rsquo;ve woken up in the middle of the night to mine pretend gold in a digital village?<\/p>\n<p>Recognising the power that games have to make people do such things, former Electronic Arts executive Marcus Thornley founded Play Consulting with a goal of creating &lsquo;gamified&rsquo; digital products which would encourage good decisions and positive behaviours.<\/p>\n<p>In partnership with Bupa, Play launched its first product Boost &ndash; an app for businesses on which employees can set and complete wellness activities to foster beneficial habits &ndash; in January 2015. It later won the LaingBuisson Innovation in Tech Award for 2016.<\/p>\n<p>In light of Boost&rsquo;s success, Thornley realised Play &ndash; a finalist at the <a href=\"https:\/\/staging.startups.co.uk\/startups-awards\/peoples-champion-finalist-2016-play-consulting\/\">2016 Startups Awards<\/a> &ndash; had great scope to &ldquo;seed start-up culture into big businesses, change how corporates think about their employees and how they execute it&rdquo;. So in May 2016 Play launched Totem, its own employee engagement platform for businesses.<\/p>\n<p>Totem has attracted a number of high profile clients including Bupa Care Homes, Pizza Hut, PwC and Leeds Building Society and has a Seal of Excellence from the European Commission.<\/p>\n<p>Having scaled from a team of two to a team of 22, Play Consulting is already profitable despite starting with a mere &pound;25 with no external investment raised.<\/p>\n<p>Play Consulting has lofty ambitions to create games that drive &ldquo;team autonomy, business success and individual happiness&rdquo; across organisations. With a huge potential market and new rollouts on the horizon, Play is in prime position to achieve this. As Thornley assures us; &ldquo;this is only the beginning&rdquo;.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Founder: Marcus Thornley Founded: March 2014 Website: www.play-consult.co.uk Have you ever looked up from your phone to find you&rsquo;ve spent the last two hours aligning virtual pieces of candy? Or maybe you&rsquo;ve woken up in the middle of the night to mine pretend gold in a digital village? Recognising the power that games have to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":91469,"featured_media":47310,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[181],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-181"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n<title>15. 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