Plenty of SME owners and senior leaders come back from a leadership course full of ideas only to find six weeks later that nothing has changed. Drawing on fifteen years of working with founders and senior teams, we look at why that happens and what to check before you choose a programme.…
Giving feedback is one of the hardest parts of leading a business. In research published by Harvard Business Review, 44% of those surveyed said giving negative feedback was stressful or difficult and 21% admitted they avoid it altogether. Emotional intelligence decides whether the conversation works or falls apart.…
The paperback of Developing Financial Leadership in Small-Medium Businesses has been out a month, and we are halfway through the Know Your Numbers series. One theme keeps coming back: the financial information exists in most SMBs, but often only one person understands what it means for the next decision.…
Wellbeing is regularly in the news, but what can leaders of small-medium businesses actually do about it? Eight key factors to work with, why pressure is so badly misunderstood and what poor wellbeing looks like inside a business. Plus the argument that most wellbeing initiatives fail for reasons that have nothing to do with wellbeing itself and everything to do with leading change.…
Two businesses can turn over the same money in the same year and be worth entirely different amounts, and the reason usually has very little to do with the year in question. Business value is a measure of what a company will be able to produce in the years ahead, which means it is built out of three things: customers who keep buying and will accept a fair price; capability that sits in the organisation and not in a…
Most people have never heard of the VCSE sector, yet in Gloucestershire it employs over 15,000 people and turns over £1.2 billion a year. Matt Lennard, CEO of the Gloucestershire VCSE Alliance, explains why he'd rename it "the prevention sector", why small charities are closing at a rate he's never seen, and why the best thing your business can give isn't a cheque - it's a trustee.…
Premiere Kitchens, a Gloucester based kitchen manufacturer, has invested £5 million in new manufacturing equipment after leadership development with QuoLux™ helped double the company's profitability in two years. Last week it unveiled a £5m investment in its Gloucester factory that…
There's a question every leader should ask their team, but most won't: "Do you feel safe disagreeing with me?" Not "Can you disagree?" (most people technically can). But do they feel safe doing it? Will they speak up when they think you're wrong, or will they stay quiet and let you walk into a bad decision?…