Elizabeth Rose Wins Family Business Lifetime Achievement Award

Family Business United is delighted to announce that Elizabeth Rose has been awarded a Family Business Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of her 25 years spent shaping not just a marketing function, but the very identity of a family business.

Elizabeth has been part of Rose Calendars, a family business founded all the way back in 1908, since 2001, and for the whole of that time she has held the title of Marketing Manager. But that title has never really captured what she does. Over a quarter of a century she has been the company's voice on customer relationships, communications, product development, sales support and, in many ways, the public face of the Rose Calendars brand itself.

One of Elizabeth's most significant achievements has been helping to establish promotional calendars as a serious, effective tool within the B2B marketplace, not a seasonal afterthought, but a genuinely valuable piece of a company's marketing armoury. Through consistent trade communication and direct engagement with distributors, resellers and corporate customers, she has spent 25 years making that case, and making it well. Along the way she has built the kind of relationships, with customers, sales agents, suppliers and colleagues, that simply cannot be manufactured quickly. Many of them have endured for decades, built on the trust that comes from someone who genuinely listens and consistently delivers.

Colleagues describe Elizabeth as approachable and personable, but also exacting, with an attention to detail that has helped maintain the quality and professionalism of the Rose Calendars brand throughout her tenure. She has adapted the business through enormous change in the calendar industry, embracing digital marketing and new customer expectations while holding on to the personal, relationship-led approach that has always defined the company. As both a family member and a long-serving member of the team, she has been a source of continuity through all of it, helping the business evolve without ever losing sight of what makes it a family business in the first place.

Elizabeth's influence reaches well beyond marketing campaigns and into the wider community Rose Calendars is part of. Since 2024 she has been a Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers, strengthening the company's ties to the wider printing and publishing trade. She has been the driving force behind Rose Calendars' long-standing support for St Helena Hospice in Colchester, turning corporate sponsorship into genuine staff participation through events like this year's Roses for Remembrance gathering at Beth Chatto Gardens and a company Bake Off that raised funds during the quieter part of the calendar season.

She has also built a genuinely practical relationship with Sailship, a local organisation supporting adults with learning difficulties and mental health needs, ensuring the company's waste wooden pallets are given a second life as furniture, planters and fencing made and sold by Sailship in support of its work.

And since 2021 she has championed Rose Calendars' Carbon Capture partnership with the Woodland Trust, a scheme through which the company and its customers have now supported new native woodland planting equivalent to around four football pitches, work Elizabeth has backed up in person, planting saplings herself on a Woodland Trust planting day in Nottingham.

What makes Elizabeth's 25 years remarkable is not simply their length, but what she has built within them. She has shaped how Rose Calendars talks to its customers, how it presents itself within its industry, and how it shows up in its community, all while remaining as enthusiastic about the business today as she was when she started. In her own words, it has been a journey she has genuinely enjoyed every step of.

Congratulations to our 2026 Family Business Lifetime Achievement Award winner, Elizabeth Rose.