As I opened the door the six people in the open plan office looked around. “Hi there, I’ve come to see Steve”, I said brightly. As a man they returned their gaze to their computer screens. They all had the hunched and dejected look of a team that resides at the bottom of the bottom [...]

Business management consulting, business coaching and the people who are highly visible in that market place are getting much more popular. People like Brian Tracy and Jack Canfield and authors like Dale Carnegie and Napoleon Hill must have benefited from the massive rise in Internet searches for their name. And the increase business guru searches [...]

Confiding in your board, or your senior managers, about your worries or anxieties about a new market, a fellow director or even the business direction is often seen as a mark of weakness and will get pounced on just like a hungry T-Rex spying a tasty morsel. And yet, we’re only human, we need someone [...]

Mary Portas’s BBC programs on reviving retailers fortunes has been consistently interesting. Sometimes because of the way her clients try and dig their heels in to avoid change. And sometimes because you can’t believe that people are just ignoring what she says when they’d have to pay a fortune to get such advice from anywhere [...]

Business coaching is big business. I’ve worked with Chet Holmes for many years now and have seen and heard a large number of different business coaches, gurus and the like. The good ones really can make a difference to a business. Often however, it does require that the business take action on what the coach [...]

When a book has the word entrepreneur in it I always feel the urge to read it and yet often come away disappointed. And realistically how many entrepreneurs feel they have enough time to read any books anyway? Luckily when I got Jonathan Yates’ “All-Time Essentials For Entrepreneurs” I quickly discovered that it was a [...]

Business growth when you’re a business owner and/or a business leader tends to be looked upon as a budget thing. For example, "We want to grow our business and make 25% more profit next year." That’s the wrong way to go about it. After all if you haven’t done some investigation how do you know [...]

Learning from Nellie, Paying for all identified training, where do you stop? And what about leadership mentoring. Find out in this post.

Eric Schmidt from Google, Steve Jobs from Apple and,John Doerr from Kleiner Perkins are just 3 of the top CEOs that get coaching from just one man, Bill Campbell. Campbell is an ex football coach who also ran Intuit (they made money program Quicken). In Silicon valley Campbell is a legend. He’s had a finger [...]

We all need a little criticism in our lives. Otherwise how could we improve? However, the carpers, the doubters and the envious we can do without. Ex-president Theodore Roosevelt said it best, “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of [...]

Henry Ford said, “You can do anything if you have enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is the yeast that makes your hopes rise to the stars.” And that’s what we all have when we start our new job, or business. And yet what starts with piles of enthusiasm can grind down into a living hell. Too often I’ve [...]

You’ll be pleased to know that you’re not alone in thinking that the Internet has nothing to do with your business. After all you don’t get any sales from your web site. You even write a blog and nothing happens there. So you may be asking why you should be investing anything into the Internet. [...]

Albert Einstein said “ The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” When you apply this to business you can see how much sense it makes. I’ve coached company owners who keep doing what they’ve always done. And often the reason they continue to do [...]

Leadership is absolutely vital when a company begins life coaching. The top management of a company must get behind their investment in life coaching and take the actions that their coach agrees with them. I used to take the view that business coaching was all about business. However, as I’ve continued to coach people I’ve [...]