Adèle Mclay

Meet Lindsay West - Values Coach Values. What are they? Are values those ‘waffly words’ you see pinned to the walls in corporates that no-one pays any attention to? Yes, they can be. Are values those things that create successful businesses – big and small – because they becomes the ‘glue’ that holds everyone together? Yes. Great examples of well known businesses that stand tall with their values and corporate culture are Zappos, Virgin, Starbucks…. Can you name others? There are plenty more. Are values critical to helping small businesses thrive? Absolutely! Can understanding our personal values transform our personal lives? You bet. I know this for a fact as taking time to understand my own values changed the course of my life and career. Meet Lindsay West. She’s a values coach, speaker and author. She works with large and small businesses, and individuals, to help them understand their values, and how those values can be integrated to create transformations. And those transformations can

Meet Mark Williams - Founder and CEO, Pensar IT Imagine being in business for +20 years, growing your ‘business baby’ into a success story, and now having the opportunity to plan for your own exit strategy. In all honesty, isn’t that what business should be about? I think it is. Yet so many business owners/entrepreneurs don’t achieve that goal. They remain a slave to their business for much of their lives, often with few options remaining towards the end of their career. Meet Mark Williams, the Founder and CEO of Pensar IT. He’s substantially grown his business over the last 20 years, through good times and bad. In recent years, he’s also had a business coach/mentor who injected rocket fuel into the leadership team and now the business is reaping the benefits; it’s even more successful than he’d imagined it could be. While Mark loves the work he does, he’s also in a phase of life where he can start planning his own exit strategy, and he is. During our conversation, Mark tells many of the business ‘w

Meet Deri Llewellyn-Davies - The Strategy Man Yes, business strategy and Mt Everest are connected. They’re connected via my friend, Deri Llewellyn-Davies. Why? Well, he’s a business strategist, and he’s also an adventurer. He has recently returned from climbing Mt Everest, and he’s done loads of other ultra adventures too. Deri uses his BGI Strategy on a Page framework to help small and medium businesses around the world focus on what’s important in their businesses. What’s strategy? Well, we talk about that in our conversation. And don’t worry, I promise you Deri won’t have you writing a big fat business plan tome that then gets shelved. He’ll inspire you to write a one pager that you’ll review daily. It’ll keep you focused on your purpose and vision in your business. Easy peasy!! :) And, if you’re planning some kind of big adventure, you can use the Strategy on a Page one pager to help you plan for that too. I know you’ll enjoy our interview, and I hope you’ll be inspired to download Deri’s

Meet Keith Dolby - Franchising Consultant/Adviser/Broker I love entrepreneurship – no surprises there, right!?! I also know that many, many small businesses fail within the first five years of operation. That’s a hard statistic to stomach. Failures happen for many reasons, and some of them include lack of systems in business, and the owner not knowing how to ‘get’ customers. Meet my friend, Keith Dolby. He’s a franchising expert and franchisee of two franchises in the UK. He’s also a franchising broker, working with people who want to be self employed and who explore franchising as a way of achieving the ‘self employment dream’. I’m fascinated with the concept of franchising. Yes, we all know the names of massive franchises in the market (McDonald’s, for instance), and yes, we’ve all heard the good, bad and ugly stories about franchising. But did you know there are about 1,000 different types of franchises in the UK and over 4,000 in the USA. Wow! It’s a huge market, in those two countries alone.

Meet Mark Cottle - Entrepreneur, Accountant, Accountancy Profession 'Disruptor' Meet my Australian friend, Mark Cottle. He’s an accountant by profession and an entrepreneur at heart… and he’s combined the two to create a fantastic business that supports accountants in Australia and the UK to reduce the cost of their biggest overhead – staff. In this week’s interview, Mark talks openly about how he has substantially developed his Australian accounting practice by thinking outside the box. As a result, how he now helps many other accounting practices operate their businesses like his. And the great thing is they are more successful and profitable. Everything is changing at a rapid rate in business. Successful businesses of the future will embrace technology and new ways of thinking in order to serve their customers. There are no sacred cows. The accountancy profession is no different. Failure to change and evolve with the times will mean businesses get left behind. Mark’s staffing model works for lo