2024 was a breakthrough year, marked by growth, leadership, and innovation. It was a year of recalibration, where clarity replaced chaos and bold decisions began to pay off. Whether it was tightening the focus, building the right team, or finally letting go of what wasn’t working. 2024 rewarded those of us who stayed committed to the vision and backed it up with action.
The year in which the cost of borrowing money continues to rise, and the economic outlook continues to look unstable. When balancing risk versus reward, the margin of error has shrunk significantly. If a business is in order, the leadership team shouldn’t be overly anxious, but now is the time to grow wisely. Making the client experience incredible is vital; if business leaders haven’t simplified how clients do business with them, they’re already behind the curve. Thinking like a Day One business to stay relevant, agile and resilient is critical.
I know success is not an accident. To be successful requires hard work, commitment and focus, but it doesn’t have to be trial and error if you follow a path where others have gone before you. I want to help individuals find their pathways to success. Whether I’m consulting with a client and their leadership team, one-on-one executive coaching, speaking at an event or working with my team on our online business – my passion and mission continue to drive me every day. I want to change the way the world grows businesses, one business and one individual at a time.
After two years in the making, we launched The Business Growth Pathway™. This simple, user-friendly platform helps business owners, leaders and entrepreneurs determine which stage of business growth their business is on. We live in the knowledge economy where information is available at a button, and the challenge is sifting through the sheer volume to find relevant, reliable, and up to date information for a business and its leaders. We wanted to help by identifying their current challenges, pain points, what they’re doing well and need to change, giving them a personalised plan and toolkit for growth. We were beginning our exciting journey of growth.
In years to come, people will study 2020 as a transformational year. It will be known as the year the world stood still, the year scientists did the unimaginable, the year when both individuals and businesses changed the way they worked, connected and socialised. Our business, like many, changed overnight; conference speaking and face to face meetings stopped immediately, the team worked from home, and zoom became our new best friend. I passionately believe in the ‘Boomerang Principle’; if we throw the boomerang far and wide, add phenomenal value to others, and make a tangible difference first, success will follow. In 2020, I threw the boomerang as far as I could throw, providing daily Facebook Lives, webinars and free content to help business owners, leaders and entrepreneurs navigate the uncertainty and challenges we all faced.
Following the success of Built to Grow, I was itching to write a second book. The feedback I received on Built to Grow was that while it focused on the logical side of growing a business – planning, numbers, actions – it didn’t touch on the person behind the company and their mindset, resilience, positive thinking and leadership qualities. So, RISE: Start Living the Life You Were Meant to Lead was born!
I’ve worked with tens of thousands of people over the past two decades, from all walks of life, and I passionately believe every person is equal and has the opportunity to achieve greatness. But the biggest block in achieving greatness is usually ourselves through our limiting beliefs and closed mindset. By taking ownership of our life, our choices, our actions and our results, we can lead the life we were meant to lead.
I had a strong desire to want to help every business owner, leader and entrepreneur build and grow the business they deserve. I knew you could create and navigate a pathway to building and managing a great business focused on being productive, not busy; feeling in control not out of control; feeling connected not isolated, and building a business and life you deserve. I had done it twice, so I set my heart and mind in writing a business book that would make a difference.
I took all my proven, time-tested ideas, strategies and tools from the past two decades; all my successes, learns and mistakes and created a blueprint to help business owners and leaders deliver accelerated, sustained and profitable business growth. Built to Grow was born and soon became a #1 best-seller on Amazon.
This was the year Ethan joined us. Having two children under 2.5 years certainly kept my wife and I busy. The business was in great shape, I had a great team, and we were making a real difference. I knew I wanted to do more but time (lack of it) was my constraint. I started to wonder how I could reach more business owners and leaders with the practical lessons I had learnt on my business growth journey. An idea for a practical coaching style business book came to mind.
I don’t think anyone can prepare you for the life-changing event of having a child. Despite Jane and I being super organised, efficient, prepared (or so we thought) we didn’t have a clue. The first three months passed by in a blur. In business, I had to trust my team to get on with the job and trust that the building blocks and foundations I had put in place were robust as I juggled with the demands of being a new daddy.
You meet thousands of people, and none of them really touches you. And then you meet one person, and your life is changed forever. This is the year I married the love of my life, best friend and soulmate. This was also the year I set up a new business, again! I was back in the start-up phase. Albeit by now, I had started to hone the formula for building and growing a business, and I wanted to put this into practice. Everything I had learnt up to this point, the good, the bad and the ugly I was either putting it in place in day one or avoiding it like the plague. I was no longer thinking about what I should do next. This was about following a strategic plan which I knew brought results.
This time was all about putting in place several core building-blocks in my business, which I now call the ten growth enablers. Within three years, I was running a million pound plus business. To be successful, I knew I had to widen our client base in terms of size of clients, number of clients, and diversification of industry sectors. I also needed to start building a more stable platform for growth; looking beyond twelve months, putting in place robust processes and systems so I could begin to identify what was working, what wasn’t, and fix it quickly. I also needed to recruit and expand the team. With more people came the need to focus more on the high performing team – defining what the business was about into a compelling story, vision/purpose, values, strategy and culture. It was at this time I also decided to sell. I sold my business for a seven-figure sum and set up a new company with an even bigger vision.
A point came when myself and the other two business owners started to clash on the direction of travel for the business and what we wanted to achieve. We all had a different vision, so we agreed to split. The timing of our split was great as I wanted my own ‘baby’ (business) which I could run as I saw fit. I wanted to take the learns from all of my diverse experiences and succeed or fall through my own choices and decision-making. This was my time to build my vision. Following a formal tender process, I won a contract to deliver training to one of the UK top retail banks which launched the business with a big bang! Because of the success of this contract, we won other clients from the financial services industry too. While this was great and it meant I could pay the bills, I quickly realised I had concentration risk (client portfolio and banking sector) plus I had key man risk – me. Luckily, I spotted this before the 2008 world financial crash!
Following my return to the UK from the US, I worked for various companies honing my business skills along the way. I started to understand the importance of culture – good and bad – and could visibly see the impact leaders had, again, good and bad! I honed my commercial skills and could start to see what makes some businesses succeed and others not.
My first foray into the world of owning my own business was a bit of a half-way house if I’m honest. I became the third owner in a training business with two other individuals. It was great exposure and very grounding, but also a steep learning curve. While this ‘on the job’ development taught me so much, it cost me a fortune in hard cash, missed opportunity and extended my timeline for growing. I got caught in the ‘doing doing doing’ and became quite successful imitating a hamster on a hamster wheel going around and around and around.
After school, I was itching to get into the world of work. I decided on a construction apprenticeship at Bircham Newton Training College in Norfolk. During this period a site agent said I should interview the three top planners about what it takes to be a successful planner. Do the same with quantity surveying etc. This shaped my whole thinking on trial & error versus success modelling, and I still use this technique today.
I was finding my way into the world of work and making it up as I was going along when I took an opportunity to move from Higgs & Hill (where I started my apprenticeship) to Balfour Beatty. One of my early projects was the Liverpool Performing Arts Paul McCartney School, and then I received a call to manage a project in America, asking could I be there by the end of the week. That one call was one of those life-changing, defining moments. My eighteen months in America pushed me out of my comfort zone and made me grow up.
School was not for me. Day after day, week after week, the same routine, same time, same classrooms. It felt stifling. I attended an academic school; I was sporty, not a great combination. In my first year, I failed all my exams, and I mean tanked big time—27 % in maths, 33% in English. To remain in school, I had to repeat year one, which meant I was a year behind all my classmates. My teachers openly shared their thoughts that I was ‘not intelligent enough.’ On reflection, my school days probably gave me my greatest motivations and drivers and were the defining periods of my life; shaping who I am today. Repeating a year made me get my head down and prove them all wrong – I grafted and got focused. I became wired to succeed in the things which people told me I couldn’t succeed in, and it taught me that the past does not equal the future unless you choose to live there.
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