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Your ideas and story

Your ideas and story

Your top ideas. Your client’s top ideas.









Once they have done so, ask them these questions.

I ‘m curious, what are your top three tips?



Start with yourself, what is your story.


Anti – testimonial







One course we ran recently had a delegate say the following;



This makes it slightly disingenuous.


We did just that.


This is what he wrote after the second event.







Go on. I dare you.


Key people in your company and life.


Are you generating mistrust?


Key people in your company and life.

I remember a significant customer who gave me so much business every year, that I joked about if he were ever ill, I would send my own personal doctor by helicopter to get him well again.

We laughed about it at the time, yet we all know that some people in our businesses, customers, key salespeople, directors and office managers can be so integral and valuable, we would do anything to keep them in situ.

With regard to team members, while this is impossible to guarantee, it is possible to strengthen their position with you to make it unlikely they would leave. It is possible to have the right health plans in place for them. We can pay them more than the open market value too. However, this is not good enough. Yes, it will help, but when you are running a business, you need more than a plan A or A & B.

First, it is not wise to be so dependant on one person. This means having a robust enough back up to replace anyone.

Secondly, it means recognising that this is a vulnerable position to let yourself be in. A table with only one or two legs will fall when one goes.

Thirdly, it means having the right people feel appreciated.

This last one is the overlooked one.

Appreciation is often shown with money, rewards or even recognition. However, the secret to appreciation is based on being real about it.

A heartfelt thank you. A case of wine, A personal thank you note. Perhaps a gift of extra time off.

One of my personal favourites is just a surprise gift. Saw this and thought of you. I knew you liked these, so I got you one.

It can often be like courting. When you are trying to win someone over you, tend to be more attentive than at any other time. Yet if we want people to be loyal and happy and productive, we have an easy option of just paying them the respect they deserve. It is not about money only. It is more about a sense of self-worth or contribution. Making a difference in people’s lives is a strong motivator. Tap into it.

Ask yourself, how can I improve the lives of the key people in my business, or life. They won’t get it easily anywhere, yet if we know how to, we can build a business based on the valuable traits that make people happy.

People will come and go for a variety of reasons. It is important to shore up the valuable assets in our businesses and families and relationships. The most valuable is often the people. Pay respect to that fact and it will serve you well.

When is losing really winning?

When is losing really winning?





So how do you win every disagreement?


  • Why are they disagreeing?
  • What do they know that I don’t know?
  • Why have they come to that conclusion?














What do I mean?





Enjoy the journey.

Holidays vs Time out

Holidays vs Time out

You may have recently had a holiday which took significant planning, proactive action and timed schedules to make possible. I know I have and sometimes it can seem such hard work that it takes the first two days of holiday to catch your breath.

Then the calm starts; you are glad to be relaxing. You get sold the idea of an activity that will take all day and drain you. It’ll be fun, and it will be tiring. You’ll sleep well. You rejuvenate more, and the benefits kick in of why you came on holiday. A wonderful feeling.

All too soon, home time looms, and the busy head gets started again. You get back, and within two days you wonder if you had a holiday.

This cycle is common. However, a friend of mine added a few twists that I consider make the whole process even more rewarding and memorable.

My long-suffering PA now has all the details I need to gather to book the holiday. I tell her where I want to go, when and for how long. She prepares a file for me. One that gives me all the details boarding cards, contacts and the insurance and anything else that I may need. It’s then copied onto dropbox. I have a small paper file as back up that fits in my passport wallet with currency and spare credit cards.

I have a prepared list of things to take that I tweak each holiday and the bags I take include the toiletries already.

This makes the process slicker and takes the prep time and stress factors to a low enough level that by the time I go, I am already chilled out.

The next level is the work that I would normally do is fully delegated, and I only come back to the stuff no one else could decide on or handle.

All the photos I take on holiday are in a shared online file, and I select the ones I want converted to a book either on the journey home, or as I go through the holiday. This gets printed for me as soon as I get back.

This all sounds wonderful. Yet the reason we take holidays is to rejuvenate. So, the more we can do so, the fresher we are when we get back. The more efficient we are for the next period before we go again. Win-Win all round.

Holidays should be rejuvenating, and under the best conditions, we get the best new ideas. Even if all we do is take time out, it should be rejuvenating enough to be beneficial.

Taking this to the idea of how you run a project in your business is duplicatable. Most of what we do can be so organised as to be rejuvenating rather than draining. Your business is a series of projects and plans and goals. Treat your business like you are planning a holiday. Boss it to benefit all concerned and make each project a holiday to remember. Take pictures and reflect on how it all went. You will look back at that project and get more energy from it because you will reflect on it. Just like you do with that fabulous holiday you had that you always smile about when you remember it and look at the pictures.

Eight biggest mistakes of business owners

Eight biggest mistakes of business owners

The following eight mistakes of business owners are not meant to be a comprehensive list because as all of who are business owners know the list is a lot longer than 8 points. However, I believe that if you address the following 8 points, those actions will have a massive impact on the profitability and success of your business.

These points are more about mindset changes as opposed to specific activities.

1. Being driven by money and not a passion for delivering value

Sure we have to make a good profit to remain in business. It’s no good having a wonderful business which you love if you do not make enough profit to live your desired lifestyle and help your teams of people do the same.

In the end, the money your business makes is a direct reflection of the value it offers and the number of people it delivers that value to

However, if your focus is ONLY on the profit, you will not build a strong growing business. A business is only as strong as the idea behind it and the value it delivers to its customers. Bear profit in mind but swing your mindset more to offering as much value as you can to your customers. The more you can grow and differentiate the value your business offers to your customers, the more “Raving Fans” you will build. Therefore, the word of mouth recommendations you get will significantly improve, and the more your business will grow.

Look at every one of your products and services. Focus ONLY on the ones that you believe you can offer extraordinary value to your customers and either ditch the rest or find a way of outsourcing that to someone else. This focus will make your systems and teams increasingly better, which will keep adding value and keep growing profits.

2. Not thinking long term sustainability

A business is not or at least should not be in the game of beating its competitors (unless it’s a sports team) It’s not about the competition – it’s about sustainability.

Business owners that focus on beating the competition simply do not understand the game they are playing. In sports, the game has a defined time limit, a defined set of rules and a referee. Your business has continually changing competition across the world; there is no time limit; there are no clearly defined rules and certainly no referee.

A business is in an infinite game where the game is really – To Stay in Business. You lose the game only if you go out of business.

If you want a long-term sustainable business, you have to start with the intention of growing a long term sustainable business not simply beating the competition.

Think long term. Build the best you can now and apply the Kaizen principle – Continuous and never-ending improvement.

  • Keep your best people long term and keep helping them to improve.
  • Build your systems for the long term and keep improving them
  • Improve your products and services continually
  • Build your financial reserves against a rainy day
  • Protect your intellectual property – the way you do what you do

3. Not working on your personal development

Every business is a reflection of its leader or leaders. The way you think determines the culture and actions of your teams and ultimately what your business does and how it does it.

Working on your business is like adding extra apps to your phone. Very useful and certainly adds value if the apps are good.

Working on yourself as Leader is like changing the operating system from a mobile phone which simply makes calls to the supercomputer you probably have in your pocket right now.

Working hard and getting coached on your personal development will change how you think, your life and business strategies and how you interact with the world. Growing personally will inevitably change your life for the better.

4. Not working on your business culture

Your business has a culture irrelevant of what you do. Your culture is how you, your teams and your business behaves. The question is – How effective is your culture in winning your business game.

In the 1960s Douglas McGregor wrote a seminal business book called the “Human Side of Enterprise” about Theory X and Theory Y companies. – Google it to learn more

Basically, theory X companies work on command and control – They believe people need to be controlled, told what to do and how to do it.

Theory Y companies believe people are generally good, self-motivated and self-directed and want to produce a good job. They prefer the autonomy of being allowed to work to the best of their abilities.

Both methods can produce excellent results. It’s just one is much more fun to work in, less stress for the business owners and potentially is more sustainable in the long term.

Today in a fast moving and ever more complex world, the most talented people are increasingly mobile and well connected. They know their own worth and are only attracted to companies where they feel valued and can work with purpose-driven highly capable teams. It’s not just the money. In the first five years of Google, nearly everyone who worked for them took a salary CUT to join them because they were excited to work in a high performing autonomous culture.

You cannot hope to run a great business by yourself.

Building a great culture to attract extraordinary people who will help you grow your business with more fun and less stress is essential in today’s world.

5. Not measuring team members performance properly

You can make every effort to employ the right people and build a great culture, but still, some people will underperform. You or their team leader may feel that underperformance in their guts but its really hard and time-consuming to pin down. If you or a team leader gives a person a bad appraisal, that person can simply dismiss that appraisal as the “Boss is just a ********! – He /she doesn’t know what she is talking about. They then carry on regardless, doing the same as before or worse still simply paying lip service to the feedback.

So what’s the answer?

360 Degree anonymous reviews for every person in the company and especially team leaders and the boss from at least five other people who work closely with them. The results should produce average scores against a whole range of criteria.

It’s easy to dismiss parts of your appraisal because the boss is a ******** but practically impossible to do so if it’s all the people you work with giving you an average low score in a particular area of your performance. It does not matter what you think. Whether you think the score is fair or not is irrelevant – the fact is that other people who work closely with you believe this is a correct indication of your performance – so nearly everyone will take more notice of the results.

It’s essential that a 360 review system is put into place to help people develop because hopefully most of your people want to do a good job. Most of us are simply blind to our weaknesses. People should want to know how to improve otherwise, why are they working with you?

Following that 360 appraisals, a personal development plan should be agreed with every employee and regularly discussed and progress tracked by team leaders.

A team leaders MAIN job should be to get the best from his/her team

This regular feedback and tracking to help low performance in certain areas are essential for everyone. Across your company, this will produce extraordinary results. Across the board, low performers can be moved to other roles to give them a chance. Ultimately, low performers are likely to deselect themselves as it is very difficult to continue work in a team when you know everyone thinks you are underperforming. You will either strive to improve, or you will leave or the company.

Sometimes the company will have to “ask” some people to leave.

If you have to go through the correct disciplinary procedure with a few people who underperform you are protected. Its very difficult for them to claim unfair dismissal when a whole team of their peers are stating in their records that they are underperforming in key areas.

For your good people – they know they are doing a good job. As such they really want to know their lower scores (which they may well be blind to) and how they can up their game.

Measuring performance fairly across a range of key criteria and following it up properly will produce high performing and happier teams

What gets measured gets managed.

6. Not enough focus on attracting, identifying and engaging great people

Many companies boast about how great their training programs are. If you spend more time energy and resources on attracting, identifying and engaging great people you can spend a lot less on training. Great people are self-motivated. They will identify their weak areas and self-train without the need for much help from you. Smart, engaged people can learn how to do most things well provided there is someone to teach them.

In my opinion, there is NOTHING more important than doing everything you can to employ the best people.

Until you are certain you have a fantastic team of HR people with a highly systemised and proven record of employing great people do not leave it to them.

How can you be certain?

Develop scorecards and questions to determine the attributes you want for every prospective employee. Your performance management system should be checked back against the scorecards produced when that person was engaged. Were the scores in line with the actual performance the employee produces?

If not adjust the employment process and questions asked to improve your engagement process to only hire world-class people.

It’s currently x10 harder to get a job with Google than it is to get into Harvard business school. That’s not because they are a highly successful company now. They are a highly successful company because they work extremely hard to get the right people and build a culture for those people to perform well.

7. Not building systems for everything

Great people are essential, and they can even get around bad systems, but why should they have to?

Everything in the business should be part of a system with strong checklists.

You should have the attitude of: To err once is human to err twice on the same thing is stupidity.

If something goes wrong and you have a system – the first thing you should do is blame is the system – most bosses blame the person when in fact the error is probably the fault of the boss for not having a proper system. If the system is at fault talk to your people on how to improve the system, so the fault does not happen again.

Does this mean all your people become robots? Absolutely not – their role is to identify exceptions to the system, faults in the systems and have the authority to act accordingly without fear. They should also be architects of improving the systems and therefore will be engaged in making it work.

With great highly engaged people constantly looking to make 1% improvements to the company systems, the company continually improves to win its game.

8. Not having a coach

All of the above points take a lot of time, energy and resources.

All great performers have great coaches, and I believe it’s almost impossible to perform well without one.

A great coach will question your beliefs and thinking from which all your actions and results are driven. They will hold you accountable to drive forward when things get difficult, and you wonder if you will ever fix big problems. They will remind you that all big problems can be resolved with a good strategy and hard work even if it takes years.

A good coach keeps you in your business game and helps you win.

Enjoy the journey

What is bothering you?



When you start to list the things that bother you and begin to wonder how best to resolve these issues, it can be very debilitating. Procrastination sets in, and the problem continues.

How do you break this circle?

First, you need to identify the problem. The first rule of dealing with any big issue is to admit it exists. Alcoholics are first asked to admit that they are an alcoholic because they can’t move on unless they do.

The same applies here.

A good friend of mine was always moaning about cask flow in his business, and I asked him to explain why he thought it was the case. He eventually admitted that he does a lot of work before being paid for it and relied on the good nature of his customers to always pay.

Once we analysed his outstanding invoices, he saw the patterns and the folly of awaiting payment. It was uncomfortable to decide to tell all his customers, money up front please, but once he bit that bullet, he solved the issue. Yes, he lost customers, but in his post-event analysis, he admitted, ‘ I lost the right ones to lose’.

Secondly, you are best to realise that you can’t solve all your own problems. You will need others to help you or even do it for you.

‘Who’ gets things done for you, is a better tactic to employ than ‘How’.

Most of the time there are quicker, more accurate and even enthusiastic people out there that will eat your problem and solve it, fast, better and to a conclusion. This is delegation and wisdom combined.

Stop holding on to the negative issues and get those that love this work to do it for you. You’ll be freer to do what you do best and less stressed too. You’ll have more energy and be more excited about the future knowing that when you hit a wall again, you’ll know what to do about it.

Surround yourself with those that love to do what you hate. Surround yourself with people smarter than you at the things that slow you down.

So, this all begins with asking yourself and being very honest about it

  1. What is bothering me,
  2. What is slowing me down
  3. What is taking my energy away?

Do you want a new computer?

Do you want a new computer?




a new way of working.



Take stock, analyse and request feedback.






Are you setting yourself up for failure?

Are you setting yourself up for failure?

So you are a strong goal setter and high achiever?


You ensure you do all the right things.






You try and set up rituals




You read relevant material or get lessons if more knowledge is required




  • Are you useless?
  • Do you simply have no will power or determination?
  • Is it just current circumstance?


Have you set yourself up for failure?



What is the magic step?

In a word – Accountability!









Without a doubt the best investment I have ever made!


Stop setting yourself up for failure



Enjoy the journey

A Coach for all.

Coaching for all

A Coach for all. Your purpose identified. Live a great life benefiting others. Get Happy.

I have a purpose to help as many people as possible engage in the process of being coached.

There are many types of coaches — Fitness, Financial, Business, Motivational and even spiritual.

Overall though a coach should be about helping you find a path that works for you, heals your failings, builds you up and engages you to find your passions. It doesn’t need to be a specific type. We are all very capable of achieving so much once we find out what it is we truly want and discover how to use that passion for a greater good or purpose.

If coaching can be boiled down to its basic elements, it would include being an encourager, a guide to a better you and a lifter of spirits.

Not all will see it this way yet in essence, if you find a new desire you hadn’t explored before, and that desire is helpful to others and makes a difference, this is something that can be infinitely rewarding and beneficial.

I remember helping a young man follow his dream to be a teacher, and the hurdles were big, the subject complicated, and, as is often the case, seemed impossible or too hard to achieve at the time. He later went on the fulfil that dream, and the catalyst for his drive was the vision of what difference it would make to others rather than to himself. The fear of failure was high. The probability was against him, yet once he’d grasped the idea of the impact it could make, coupled with even if he didn’t fully achieve his dream, he would have made a big difference. He was so determined, he did, in fact, achieve his desire.

A good coach brings out the possibilities, the motivation and the ideas that may not have been obvious on the initial analysis. This can be achieved in any field and for any person.

Schools should have life coaches. Universities, homeless centres, addict charities, the health service. ALL could benefit. ALL should have access.

My passion is helping others be the best they can be. This doesn’t need to be limited to a business, it can be for anyone. The YOU, that sits inside, that is awaiting the spark and has incredible potential for positive change, is there. It may need coaxing out or releasing, but it is there.

Some have already found it and love their lives and live according to their skills, desires, passions and purpose. Do you want to join them? A good coach will help you find that power and bring it out into the open. The how to achieve will take care of itself, once you find the true desire and drive you have for the things you wish to do. Once you find your uniqueness.

Inspire, save, unlock potential, create a big impact, enrich and many other types of descriptions come to mind. A coach is for all types of people for all reasons. A coach is a coach no matter what the subject.

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