Great leaders are accessible
Leaders lead. Find your way to be available to anyone. Be visible and be accountable. With change comes new thinking and uncertainty. So, what feels like opportunity to you, might feel disquieting for your team. Great leaders find lots of ways to be available and accessible to everyone in their…
The £100,000 pencil
I spent some of Bank Holiday Monday researching branded pencils (I know how to enjoy myself!!). Prices range from 6p to around one pound, with one outlier. AllBranded.co.uk (via paid search) are offering a branded pencil for £99,999. Not only that, there is a minimum order quantity of 1000. So…
CEO, Web Solutions Agency
It’s been great working with you – in short we’ve loved having you on board and you felt like an extension of the team. It’s safe to say you’ve helped us a huge amount.
MD, Media Agency
We used Andy to train and develop the senior client-facing leaders on developing commercially curious conversations. This has paid dividends … in a difficult economic environment
Book Review: The Inside Out Revolution by Michael Neill
Summary: tap into your deeper intelligence to access your natural wisdom. Easy to read, hard to master advice that could be life changing 9/10. At 120 pages with writing that is simple, clear and repetitive, this is not a demanding read. In fact, the fundamental idea is also very simple…
Book Review: The Go Giver by Bob Burg and John Mann
Summary: A parable which reminds you that being genuine and engaged can lead to huge rewards. 7/10 Some business books a weighty tomes that promote a single, often self-evident, truth across hundreds of pages. This really engaging little book takes a huge idea and delivers the whole thing in under…
Agency retainers are not a thing of the past
Retainers remain important to the majority of agencies, but agency leaders reported a change in clients’ attitudes towards them. The responses showed that while retainers are slightly less common than they were (and can be for shorter periods), typically agencies are not seeing a negative impact on revenues. Some noted…
What keeps agency owners awake at night?
During an Agency Sales Transformation workshop in 2019 (when I was at Waypoint Partners), led by Partner Lisa Mandell, we asked a dozen agency leaders what sales challenges were keeping them awake at night. We dealt with each in turn and started to explore ways of addressing them. All shared…
When should I fundraise?
Raising funds, either seed for your start-up or for Series A, B or C, is distracting and time consuming. What’s more, it’s an activity that usually falls outside company founders’ area of expertise, which means they often try to defer or avoid it. Consequently, entrepreneurs often ask us “when should…
When a butterfly flaps it’s wings
About four weeks ago (Sept 2018) I bumped into Milan Lad. He was standing outside Cannon Street station handing out CVs. “I’m looking for a job in Investment Banking. Can you help?” he asked as people walked past. He was smart & well-spoken and, most importantly, was clearly getting off…