Achieving growth

What my clients and associates achieve
To give you a flavour of the range and type of people and companies I work with, I have asked some of my clients and associates to summarise what they have been achieving recently. It’s an interesting tapestry.

I hope you find their achievements interesting and perhaps food for thought for your own business. If you’d like to be included in future updates, send me your news and achievements, and I’ll be glad to spread the word!

Paolo Venturini, founder of management consultancy Nemultus, has completed three major projects in the last 18 months:
• He defined the strategy for the global R&D footprint of one of the three largest multinationals in agricultural seed development, headquartered in Switzerland
• He set up ecommerce operations for Italy’s largest generalist retailer
• He contributed to a study (published by OECD) to define the strategy to attract foreign direct investment from food multinationals in Kazakhstan

Weedie Sisson of People First Limited, having built a sole practitioner coaching and consulting business over the last 6 years, is now embarking on an expansionist strategy and has started looking for like-minded folk with complementary offerings who would seriously consider joining forces. She has also been up for two awards for her people development work in the legal sector. Sadly she missed out on the first one, but the second is still up for grabs!

Lisa Thompson, after two years of meticulous research and planning, has launched her collaborative business services model Blue Acorns, which is truly innovative and distinctive. This is still a fledgling operation but the first three months have been very encouraging for all involved in the initiative.

Gordon Borer, of Exceptional Performers, is embarking on a very exciting project relating to the dark art (or is it a science?) of business development, which should shed some light on what it is and what it is not!

Andrew Pullman of People Risk Solutions has developed an innovative HR Healthcheck that helps firms to objectively assess the level of risk they are running. Typically this process also produces a menu of actions that can be taken to address the gaps, and how PRS will help fix the problems. In the area of health costs, PRS can typically demonstrate a saving of between £5 and £8 for every £1 invested!

Congratulations to all of them!

What I’ve been doing
And lastly, myself. Well, Cass is keeping me busy. I’ve been appointed as a course tutor on a new degree programme – the MSc in Leadership, which attracted some interesting coverage in CityAM this week:
http://www.cityam.com/article/teaching-leadership-post-crisis-mbas-are-changing-emphasis

This is going to represent a regular commitment from September onwards. It’s very exciting, but it’s also a little bit scary at the same time, as it’s very much unexplored territory for me. The collaboration with the Inspirational Development Group (IDG) is first class, and the opportunity to be involved in delivering training at Sandhurst is one not to be missed.

I’m also involved in the sales, development/design and delivery of a programme for risk officers, in conjunction with the Risk Management Association (RMA) in Philadelphia. This will run in February 2014.

The third area of activity is entrepreneurship, so closer to the world of David Mellor Mentoring. I have three different programmes at different stages of evolution, and will tell you more on these next time as they merit more detailed coverage.

Outside of Cass I’ve been kept busy with routine mentoring assignments with start-ups and growth businesses, and have taken on a few new assignments. I’ve also been running my “Crew to Captain” workshops (up to three a month), my adaptive selling workshops (using PRISM), and my “How to start a sole practitioner consultancy” workshop. This needs a better title, so I will probably adopt the one for the forthcoming book on the same topic: “From Crew to Captain: a Privateer’s Tale”!

Next month I’ll be telling you more about these topics. If you’d like to be included in future updates, send me your news and achievements, and I’ll be glad to spread the word!

To your continued success.