Our Story

We’re Mark and Caroline Walker, aka Balenst. We’re also a family: Mark, Caroline and Elloise. Like most families we have many calls upon our time – work, friends and family, hobbies and interests, cleaning, maintenance, paying bills… how is one to manage all these demands and maintain a healthy, happy work/life balance?

Work is especially demanding for many people. It can eat away at your free time, and it can be ravenous. This has ever been true, it’s nothing new. But today’s world has brought new challenges. Modern communication can make it difficult to unplug from work. Have you checked messages at 9pm? Maybe you are working from home more often. This can be very disruptive – with your family distracting you from work, and worse – work distracting you from your family.

Finding a balance is hard, and the answers aren’t easy to find. Well, we’re here to tell you – it doesn’t have to be this way.

Looking back over the last fifteen years has shown us just how much one’s life can change. We met through work. Got engaged during a sabbatical to New Zealand and married in 2013. Two years later Elloise was born. We’ve also moved and settled in Rutland. It was easy to lose track of one’s equilibrium among all the bustling activity. And then came Covid.

We always wanted to create our own perfect work/life balance, but who has the time? Ironic isn’t it? We both had achieved senior positions during successful careers, but the pandemic caused a shift. A shift in the traditional ways of doing business, and a shift in our perspectives. We were all affected by the turbulence of the pandemic period of 2020-2022. For us it caused a re-evaluation of our beliefs and of our careers. We no longer felt that corporate life fitted with our new normal.

And so we took it as an opportunity to focus on what we love doing, without the politics of the business culture. We’ve developed a work/life balance that fits around our busy and productive lives. We feel balanced.

Hence the name, Balenst.
Adjective: ‘A state of equilibrium’, /ˈbælənst/

We took it from the international phonetic alphabet “spelling”, and it reflects our ethos perfectly. Now we offer this as a service, using our skills and industriousness to help our clients find equilibrium. And find their own perfect balance.