After a breakdown brought on by a toxic workplace, Jonny Wilks rebuilt his life and leadership philosophy from scratch. Now Managing Director at Lucart Hygiene Ltd, he is proving that putting wellbeing first is not just the right thing to do – it is good business too…
When Jonny Wilks talks about wellbeing at work, it is not just a buzzword to make his business look good. It comes from a very real place, born out of his own experience of being pushed to a very dark place.
He rebuilt his life from the ground up after suffering a breakdown at work and vowed to put those hard-earned lessons at the heart of his leadership. And that he has.
Jonny is now Managing Director at Lucart Hygiene Ltd in Worcestershire, leading a team of around 100 employees. If the first half of his career story is about rise and fall, the second is about turning those experiences into a hard-fought leadership philosophy centred on wellbeing – and proving it in numbers.
“When I became an MD, I thought I never, ever, ever want anyone working for me to go through that,” he says.
The goal was to create a workplace that felt safe, physically and mentally, where people could talk openly about how they were feeling.
“Whatever’s going on in the world, when you come to work, you’re in a safe place.”
It is also deeply personal.
Before he was leading a manufacturing business, Jonny was chasing a very different career. Until his early 30s he played bass in 90s band Hooper, gigging in Manchester and London, selling CDs and T-shirts mostly on the university circuit. They rehearsed in the same spaces used by the likes of The Charlatans and shared bills with bands like Gomez.
“It was never about being a global rock star,” he says. “It was always about the music.”
Then came the moment that redefined everything. After years slogging away, the band had a major opportunity in London to play in front of record executives. They had met names along the way, including Terry Christian, Paul Gallagher and The Police’s Stuart Copeland. But on the eve of their big break, in Jonny’s words, they “totally blew it”. The music ended abruptly and that dream was over.
“It’s disappointing the way it ended,” he says. “I’ve had a lot of guilt about that.”
With £60 to his name and in his mid-30s, he booked a flight to Magaluf to figure out what came next. There he met a woman from Portsmouth, followed her home and got a job as a cleaner in a factory. But with that job he made a promise to himself that would define the next two decades. For better and worse.
“I’m never failing at anything ever again,” he told himself.
Despite the modest role, he set out to be the best cleaner possible. Someone noticed his attitude and promoted him, first to machine operator and then onwards through the ranks. Over 12 years he worked in risk management, health and safety and production management before eventually reaching the top job in a multi-million-pound business – from cleaner to managing director of a local site within a global company.
It is a story of graft and determination, but for Jonny the same refusal to fail that propelled him upwards also became an Achilles heel.
“It was responsible for the height you got to, but it was also responsible partly for the lows,” he says.
Because the environment he was climbing in was toxic.
“I thought this was just part and parcel of being in a corporate job, until one day I had a breakdown, which came out of nowhere,” he says.
It happened late one evening, around 9pm, alone in the office above the factory floor. He began to feel strange, then his breathing deepened. Panic followed.
“Then I just cramped up,” he recalls. “I was on the floor for a couple of hours. I didn’t know what to do.”
Below on the factory floor the evening shift was running, but Jonny did not want anyone to see him. He could not work out how to get home. Eventually he called a colleague on the other side of the country.
“I knew she wasn’t going to judge me,” he says.
She contacted the HR director, who arranged for the company’s customer services manager to come to the site.
The weeks that followed blurred into a period of isolation.
“I went home and immediately just went into this really dark place,” he says. “Didn’t want to communicate, didn’t want to come out of the room, didn’t want to eat. That total feeling of total and utter failure. How on earth does this happen to me?”
He describes a spiral of worthlessness, self-pity and shame that can accompany a breakdown, and the inner voice that insists you should simply “man up and get on with it”. In his case it was made worse by impostor syndrome after working his way up from entry-level jobs. When he fell, the fear was that it proved he never belonged there.
The real blow, he says, was what happened next. Apart from a couple of emails to his wife from HR, almost nobody from the business reached out. The contrast that stayed with him was the kindness of one forklift driver who turned up at his home with a book.
It was called The Miracle Morning.
He did not read it straight away, but when he did it introduced a routine that became the foundation of his recovery. Up at 5am, an hour dedicated to reflection, writing, reading and exercise.
“I started doing that 10 years ago,” he says. “I’m still doing it now.”
Slowly, the routine got him back outdoors and back into motion. Within six months he returned to the same job, but left within days.
“I knew that that was part of the problem,” he says of the environment he had been in.
It was some time before he even considered senior leadership again. When he applied for the role that would bring him to Worcestershire, he told himself it was simply interview practice. He had not interviewed in 22 years. He went through five interviews with Lucart and still assumed it would come to nothing.
Then they offered him the job and asked if he could start on Wednesday.
“I remember thinking, what, this wasn’t meant to happen,” he says.
He went home and told his wife he had a job in Worcester.
“She’s like, where’s Worcester?” he recalls. “‘Doesn’t matter. I’m starting on Wednesday.’”
Lucart’s approach to wellbeing started with listening. Jonny commissioned an anonymous employee survey, repeated annually to track progress. A Chamber member, The Business of Mindfulness, helped define the wellbeing strategy over the first few years.
He is blunt about the challenge many businesses face. Creating that culture takes time and money, and the return is not immediate.
“It’s hard work,” he says. “You’ve got to spend a lot of time and money getting to a place where you start seeing the return, whether that’s in productivity and morale, engagement, absenteeism or retention.”
Consistency has been key. Jonny insists the easiest way to fail is to treat wellbeing as optional when pressure hits. “You can’t take your foot off this,” he says. “As soon as you say, okay, we’ve got a wellbeing champions meeting next Monday it has to happen no matter what.”
The cultural shift has been deliberate and practical. Over two years Lucart has gone from one mental-health-trained employee to 8, with wellbeing champions in every department who meet monthly to propose initiatives. Crucially, Jonny has seen some of the biggest changes in the people who initially dismissed the idea.
“It was these employees who had this sort of hard facade who actually talked the most,” he says.
The impact has been measurable.
Recruitment has strengthened, with “five times the amount of people applying for vacancies”. Absenteeism has fallen from 6% to 2.5%. Productivity has increased by 25% over three years.
“It’s not just a nice thing to do – the right thing to do,” he says. “It’s actually a good business decision.”
For Jonny, the numbers matter because they make the case to leaders who are sceptical or stretched. They also counter a version of workplace wellbeing he knows all too well, where values are “plastered everywhere” but only exist for visitors.
“Everyone on the shop floor knew it was absolute nonsense,” he says of former employers. “It was there to outwardly look as though the company was interested when it really didn’t have any interest.”
Now he wants to show what it looks like when a business genuinely walks the talk – and to share those lessons with others.
Lucart Hygiene Ltd has sponsored the Herefordshire & Worcestershire Chamber of Commerce’s Health and Wellbeing Conference for the past three years. They were joined this year by Workwell.
“We’re doing a lot around health and wellbeing as a business,” he says. “We share our journey, the pros and the cons, with other companies that might be either thinking about introducing it or have, because it’s not easy.”
That commitment also shows up in small, human moments. He likes to know people’s names and families. He writes handwritten Christmas cards with personal notes. If a shift has hit strong figures, he likes to congratulate someone in person.
“The supervisor will email me in the morning and go, they were on cloud nine after you patted them on the back,” he says.
He also sets boundaries that might surprise some leaders. If someone sends him an email at 10pm to prove they are working late, his instinct is not to praise it but to discourage it.
“They don’t need to prove anything to me by sending me an email at 10 o’clock,” he says.
It is not that the pressures of leadership have disappeared. Jonny admits he still has a tendency to isolate himself and is “not good at talking” about work at home. He finds support through relationships with other business leaders he meets through the Chamber, and through activities that help him switch off, such as golf.
“For me, it is a form of therapy,” he says. “It stops me thinking about other stuff.”
That honesty is part of why his story resonates. He is not presenting a perfect transformation. He is describing something that, in his words, “takes constant management”. He will not go back to the place he was 10 years ago, and he is clear about what he will not tolerate.
“I know what bad looks like,” he says. “So I won’t accept toxic behaviour.”
His message to other employers is simple. In a labour market where skills are scarce and retention is hard, culture is not a soft issue.
“More than ever,” he says. “I personally don’t think there’s any excuse for not having a good corporate company culture. Zero excuse.”
Even if a high-performing leader is delivering revenue, he says, it cannot come at the cost of people’s wellbeing. “They wouldn’t be working for me,” he says.
Because, as he has learned the hard way, what happens at work never stays at work.
“When people go home feeling stressed, anxious, worried, it has an impact on their whole lives, their whole families,” he says. “It needs to be eradicated.”
At Lucart, the shift to putting health and wellbeing at the centre has not just improved morale. It has improved performance.
A supportive workplace is not a perk. It is a strategy. And for businesses willing to do the hard, consistent work of building a better culture, he believes the return is not just ethical.
“It pays dividends too.”
For more information visit
https://hwchamber.co.uk/health-and-wellbeing-forum/
