Catherine Turner Built an Agency by Following the Paths Nobody Had Paved

The first clue was her heartbeat. Catherine Turner was a freelancer on a project in Madrid, standing on the floor of a very large show while rehearsals were under way. Around her, the peculiar machinery of live events was turning plans into spectacle. Her heart began pounding. She knew, right there, that this was her industry.

It is a wonderfully physical origin for a career now concerned with abstractions such as engagement, behaviour change and organisational transformation. Turner likes the moment when an idea acquires lights, voices, timing and an audience. She went from that Madrid assignment into full-time agency roles, learning the trade from inside. Then the agency employing her ceased trading. A job ending became an invitation, although it probably did not arrive looking like one.

In 2009 she founded CTL Communications. The beginning was domestic and decidedly uncinematic: a spare room or kitchen table, depending on which part of the working day one imagines, along with freelancers, cash-flow calculations and the awkward business of finding clients. Turner has called it a leap of faith. There was no blueprint. There was simply an idea, some accumulated experience and the decision to say yes before certainty had the chance to become a requirement.

The path her mother drew first

Turner has a useful metaphor for such decisions: desire lines. In urban design, these are the unofficial tracks worn into grass by people who ignore the prescribed walkway and choose the route that actually takes them where they want to go. They are small acts of collective editing. The planner supplies a path; the public supplies a better sentence.

For Turner, the idea is personal. Her father left when she was two. Her mother, raising five children on a secretary's salary, moved the family from England to Australia in search of a better life. Turner describes her as resourceful, resilient, fiercely determined and adventurous. Long before her daughter founded anything, she had demonstrated how a person could leave the marked route and make another one by walking it.

That family history keeps Turner's founder story from becoming one of those tidy business fables in which ambition arrives fully dressed and carrying a spreadsheet. Her version begins with necessity, observed courage and the permission to move. Sixteen years after starting CTL, she wrote that her mother's example remained at the heart of what she did.

A crisis changes the offer

For its first decade, CTL was primarily an events business. Then 2020 emptied the rooms. The obvious response was to put the event on a screen, but CTL's more important change was to reconsider what people on the other side of that screen needed. Employees did not want corporate pep rallies from what the agency once cheekily called “Chief Entertainment Officers.” They wanted candour, empathy and leaders who understood what remote work felt like.

CTL expanded its virtual events and internal communications work. It created employee experiences around resilience and collaboration and helped leaders communicate with more empathy and trust. An industry award entry later reported that the team grew by more than half during 2020, despite several months of minimal revenue, and grew again in 2021. The emergency manoeuvre became a new direction.

By 2024, CTL's reported revenue had climbed from £5 million in 2019 to more than £13 million. Headcount had moved beyond 90. Its services now stretched across live, hybrid and virtual events, digital work, campaigns, internal communications and change programmes. Turner calls continual reinvention essential. The phrase has none of the perfume of a corporate value, which is perhaps why it works. Continual reinvention means yesterday's good answer may have expired overnight.

The interesting part is not the size of the second bar. It is the change in the noun. CTL stopped defining itself chiefly by the format it produced and began defining itself by the effect a client needed: understanding, engagement, adoption, action. A stage, a campaign and a digital experience can all serve that end. Once the company saw the problem this way, its old boundary looked rather arbitrary.

Trust as an operating system

Growth from five people to nearly 100 in five years poses an awkward question. How does a founder who likes the floor of the show avoid becoming a distant face on a video call? Turner's answer starts with culture, but it is more practical than posters and slogans. CTL is fully remote. It uses defined career paths, role-specific professional courses and regular online and in-person touchpoints. Turner says the model allows the agency to recruit strong talent without making geography the first test.

Her plainest leadership principle may also be the most revealing: people work hard for people they enjoy working for. She tries to be a role model, “get in the trenches,” help when needed and have fun while doing it. There is calculation beneath the warmth. Affection creates responsibility. A colleague becomes someone you do not wish to disappoint.

One employee story puts flesh on that principle. Teigan Harbour was a 24-year-old producer when she contacted Turner directly with a proposal: CTL should build an in-house digital department, and Harbour wanted to lead it. Three months later Turner gave her the role. The team began with three people, reached four within a year and grew to eight in three and a half years.

A young employee asked to create a department that did not exist. The founder answered with a budget, a title and trust. Harbour has said that belief changed both her career and CTL. The story rhymes with Turner's beloved desire lines. This time, her job was not to cut the path. It was to notice someone else had begun one and resist the executive urge to pave over it.

The company has also attached policy to the rhetoric. Turner reported in March 2025 that women made up most of the team and 80 percent of its leadership. CTL offers flexible work, phased returns, reduced hours and four-day weeks for returning mothers. It funded a full professional HR qualification for an employee who would later help shape family-leave policy. Opportunity, in this version, is not merely an inspirational noun. It comes with time, money and altered working conditions.

Winning, then looking surprised

In March 2025, Conference News presented Turner with its Agency Pioneer Award, recognising 15 years of contribution to the events industry. When her name was called, her private response was delightfully unvarnished: “Wait... me?” She later wrote that she was still a little blown away.

The surprise was not false modesty. Turner spoke openly afterward about imposter syndrome and the peculiar force of being recognised by agencies she had admired. Women approached her after the ceremony to say the moment had inspired them. An award can be a handsome object on a shelf. It can also revise another person's estimate of what is possible.

Turner's own advice to people entering events is exploratory: research the many corners of the industry, talk to practitioners, attend shows and pay attention to what sparks interest. Then comes the phrase that has followed her career: “I can do that.” It is not a claim of perfect preparedness. It is a decision to become prepared in public.

Keep the heartbeat, change the machinery

The next reinvention is already visible. Turner sees uses for AI in research, workflow and design, while CTL has published guardrails around human review, transparency, security and professional judgement. She also expects virtual experiences to remain part of the events mix because clients care about budgets and sustainability. The screen did not kill the room. It made purpose more important than format.

CTL wants to expand beyond the healthcare foundation where it built much of its experience. Turner talks about integrated campaigns, transformation work and end-to-end delivery. Yet for all this broadening, she still goes on-site whenever she can. She wants to stand close enough to the action to see creative work become real.

That instinct connects the 25-year industry veteran to the freelancer in Madrid. The machinery around her has changed: stages became streams, events became campaigns, a one-person operation became a distributed company, and artificial intelligence joined the production toolkit. The test remains physical and human. Does the message land? Does the room move? Does anyone care?

Turner's career is a desire line worn at business scale. Her mother showed her that the prescribed route was optional. The closure of one agency cleared the ground for another. A pandemic forced an events company to rethink what it sold. A young producer drew a line toward digital and was allowed to follow it. The resulting path is not straight, and this may be its chief recommendation. Straight lines are excellent for diagrams. Lives usually improve when allowed a little grass.