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How to Depress an Enterprise Culture

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Enterprise is a dangerous thing.

In the wrong hands it can re-distribute wealth from the wealthy and put it in the hands of the poor.  If this happens of course vast swathes of public services could be cut back.  Job Centres could be closed down, demand for health services might plummet and swathes of middle class ‘helping’ professionals could be laid off.  So, ensuring that enterprise culture remains depressed and marginalised  in some of our poorer communities is essential to social progress and economic recovery.

Here is your quick guide on how to do it…

  • Build a Public/Private Sector Partnership with the Mission of ‘Promoting Enterprise’

Counter intuitive I know.  But if it just looks like a government/council/housing association led initiative it may lack credibility.  Getting a few (even one) local business person on board will really increase credibility and increase the chances of winning investment.  Be very careful though.  Private sector people will actually want to see enterprise encouraged.  As soon as they see the real effects of the programme they are likely to flee like proverbial rats on a sinking ship.

  • Get your hands on a large sum of money

People are inherently enterprising.  They show all sorts of creative and innovative ways to make life better or at least more bearable.  Fortunately for us many of these (in fact the vast majority) don’t show up in our measures of enterprise so we simply deny them and state that communities with low start-up and VAT registration rates are ‘lacking in enterprise’. However, the point remains, people are inherently enterprising and if we wish to discourage enterprise it can be expensive.  A few million should do it to sustain a 2 or 3 year campaign.

  • Invest substantial sums in prolonged marketing campaigns encouraging enterprise and claiming that anyone can do it

I know this seems counter-intuitive.  If we want to discourage enterprise, then surely we shouldn’t be promoting it?  But bear with me – this works.  If we can get a message out there that says

‘You can be your own boss, running your dream business: All it takes is a bright idea and the determination to succeed’

…our battle is practically won.  Leaflets, posters, websites, adverts on commercial radio stations and buses.  Just flood the target areas of deprivation with marketing collateral.  Ideally also recruit some enterprise champions to attend local community centres and summer fairs handing out leaflets and letting everyone know just how much support is available to the would be entrepreneur.  And if you want to blow a few tens of thousands on a website too – well it will do no harm.

People will come forward in reasonable numbers especially if we help them out with bus fares, offer free lunches, crèches and hint at the possibility of funding to listen to our messages.  Enterprise for all, Anyone can do it, All it takes is hard work, You don’t even need a bright idea – we can give you one of those…

  • Procure Your Own MBA Enterprise (Lite)

Now all we need to do is feed them into an Enterprise MBA (anorexically) Lite.  Perhaps three half day workshops with a decent consultant who can make it all seem so very simple.  Half a day to work up the idea, half a day to develop a marketing plan and half a day to look at financials should do it.  Perhaps supported by a week-end Enterprise Show that offers ‘All you need to know about business in one day’.

Whatever you do please do not encourage team based start ups.  These are far too likely to succeed.  Encourage the myth of the ‘lone entrepreneur’ at every opportunity.

Now we can just sit back and wait.

If we work really hard at this within a year or two we can have perhaps 1000 bright shiny new businesses – most of them run by the gullible who really believe that with all the support available this should be easy.  And the magic starts.  They suddenly find that this is hard work, and it is relentless.  The business becomes like a cuckoo, requiring constant attention, dragging them away from family and friends, requiring time, money and lots of hard work.

NB be very careful not to provide any form of ‘relationship’ with your wannabe entrepreneurs other than the poorly transactional/technical.  You must never employ competent coaches who might help them to balance these tensions and maintain their motivation to succeed.  Instead employ people who have never run a business nor have been trained as coaches and use them as recruitment sergeants for the MBA Lite.  You can call them Enterprise Coaches.  Just make sure that their enterprise experience is limited and their room to coach negligible.  As our wannabe entrepreneurs start to feel and show the strain of running their own businesses we can start to blame their struggles on them.  ‘Perhaps you are just not cut out to be an entrepreneur’. Again avoid telling them the true stories of many successful entrepreneurs who often cut their teeth in failing businesses before finally finding a recipe for success.  Luckily there is a whole industry of motivational speakers and ex Apprentices who will help you to re-tell and re-enforce the Enterprise Fairy tale.  (NB don’t underestimate the budget you will need to procure their services.  This seems to be one area where the vast supply available has not resulted in driving down prices…)

  • Run a ‘Modest’ Grants and Loans Programme

Lending people money or even giving small grants to get their businesses started provides a wonderful mechanism to ensure that painful lessons about enterprise have a long-lasting and practical impact.  It also helps us to short-cut the most commonly raised objection to starting a business which is ‘I don’t have the cash’.  This is a vital step.  In its absence they may go and speak to lenders who will explain to them that their business is unlikely to work and that they will not be able to pay for any investment they seek.  THIS IS DISASTER!  We should do all we can to avoid exposing our wannabe entrepreneurs to such doses of reality.

By running our own grants and loan schemes we also help to lay the seeds for decades of resentment in the community.  Firstly we will have the chance to refuse many who apply for loans.  This really ticks them off, wastes their time, puts them off the enterprise process and makes them deeply suspicious of anyone who offers to invest in entrepreneurs.  And for those that we do make loans there is a good chance they will default – but even if they don’t they will see us as money lenders – and no-one really likes their lenders, do they?  And if we give them a grant, because no one else will lend them money – well we are almost certainly setting them up to fail.  If their business idea was inherently profitable they would not need to come to us for a grant.

NB actually setting up a grant or loan service can be hard.  Instead, do a deal with a local credit union and get them to work ‘under your brand’.   This way you get all of the upsides without having to actually do any of the dirty work.  Never signpost people to independent sources of finance and investment.  This risks your client seeing you as the good guys and them, the evil moneylenders, as the bad guys.  Of course if your long-term goal of depressing enterprise culture is to be achieved then you need to be perceived as the bad guys – so bring the finance guys under your brand.

  • Now be patient

That’s it.  Now sit back and watch the results of your labour come to fruition.  You have encouraged perhaps a thousand people to start businesses.  Of course, some of these would have started their businesses anyway.  And some will expect to work all hours to get things working well.  But many, if we are lucky a majority, will be anticipating some sort of cake walk to entrepreneurial success.

And so the magic starts.

The demand for many hours of hard work kicks in.  The money flows out, and our trap is sprung.  We may have had to put up with a short-term spike in the start-up rates (it is unlikely that many VAT registrations will occur as a result of our MBA Lite) but now we can expect the start-up rate to quickly fall away again.

We now have a small army of failed and failing entrepreneurs in our community, with neighbours and friends talking about their latest entrepreneurial failure, trying to service their debts and walk away from their ‘dream business’ turned nightmare.  If you have done your work well perhaps loan default rates could be significantly above 50%.  We do not need to promote these failures.  Indeed we can be portraying them as successes to ensure that we recruit another tranche to our MBA.  The entrepreneurs will collude with us in portraying their success – but the community will recognise and spread the truth.  That enterprise is hard and inherently risky, and that in spite of all the support available the decks are stacked and success often remains elusive.

But what, I hear you say, of those that ‘succeed’.  Aren’t they walking adverts for the entrepreneurial dream?  Well, actually, No.  Most of them will be in the ‘working like a dog for not much money’ phase.  Even those on the road to entrepreneurial success (typically by way of a start-up failure or two) will be like government sponsored health warnings against the dangers of an entrepreneurial life style.

  • Commission a Mid Term Evaluation

It must be glossy and full of warm words and smiling faces.  Don’t worry, even your most miserable and hate filled entrepreneurs will be prepared to smile for your cameras as you explain to them that many potential customers will read this report.  If possible get an evaluator with a double barrelled name and a decent reputation to undertake the evaluation.  They will understand the politics of the situation and can be relied upon to be sympathetic.

  • Avoid producing lists of the entrepreneurs you have helped and the businesses you have started

Such lists can be problematic.  People who are interested in enterprise in their communities might ring up some of your clients and find out whether they are living the dream or not.  If you are wise each of the clients will have been helped by several of your partners and will have been counted more than once.  Such double counting can easily be hidden away in a database.  Indeed we can blame it on the IT system.  A published list is much less forgiving.

  • Get Out Early

Ideally after a 2-4 year campaign such as this you should now withdraw your sources of advice and support.  If you are lucky you will be able to blame this on central government cuts and ‘The Recession’.  Don’t worry the long-standing enterprise support organisations such as the Enterprise Agencies or Business Link won’t be able to pick up the slack – they are already stacked out.

FAQs

Q: We have spent several millions refurbishing old buildings in deprived areas as ‘enterprise centres’ and have helped establish Development Trusts and CICs to run them.  Is there any danger that these might serve to promote enterprise in areas of deprivation?

A: Relax!  It is true that you have spent millions that you could have held onto – but it is unlikely that you will have done any real harm to our mission of depressing enterprise in deprived areas.   As long as you have built in lots of overheads (Victorian listed buildings that are inherently energy inefficient, combined with generous staffing and ‘architectural’ use of atria and ‘overpriced shared working space’ should suffice).  Unless you make the mistake of offering really competitive prices for decent office space with easy terms you are not going to fill up with local sustainable businesses capable of paying their rents consistently.  This mistake is almost impossible to make as if you should, no doubt unwittingly, provide any meaningful competition to the private sector there will be howls of complaints about anti-competitiveness.

NB leave the buildings with a legacy investment so that they can sustain themselves for a year or two after you have gone.  This way you may avoid some of the blame for commissioning a white elephant.

As the poor CIC or Development Trust pursues ‘break even’ it will have to forget its social mission and, at worst, the car park will fill up with BMWs, Audis and 4x4s as entrepreneurs from  out of town recognise that their are deals to be done on some sexy workspaces.   Or they may shift their focus from ‘enterprise centre’ to ‘conference centre’.  Or the car parks (and bicycle sheds) will remain stubbornly empty and after many months or years of support the centre will die a long and lingering death.  In most of our communities this trajectory can still be seen playing out in versions of ‘enterprise centres’ from the 70s, 80s, and 90s.

You may find that some claim the Enterprise Centre gives local people something to aspire too and that this will somehow lead to an entrepreneurial revolution.  Again Relax.  Go and talk to the operations manager in any of the older incarnations of the enterprise centres.  They, their low occupancy rates, and their key tenants running government programmes, will testify that no such enterprise revolution is likely to occur.

Q: We have executed the plan perfectly.  Does this mean that we can take the foot of the gas?

A: No!  People are inherently enterprising.  As soon as you stop, the recovery starts.  They start to make progress again.  Luckily it tends to be slow and pain staking but it happens.  You must be prepared to re-brand and relaunch the whole project again at least every 10 years.

Q: Hang on a minute!  We have done some or all of the above in the name of encouraging enterprise in deprived communities.  Are you saying that we have got it wrong?

A:…Well of course only time will tell.  But in short, Yes.

Where is Your Enterprise Service At….?

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I love 2×2 matrices.  But there are worse crimes I suppose. Of course they oversimplify things, deny shades of grey, limit ‘nuancing’ and so on.

But they work for me.

They help to clarify where we are, where we need to be and can generate ideas about how we get there.  Take this 2×2 for example which maps the credibility/utility of the service we offer versus its visibility/accessibility.

Visibility versus Credibility

High/High – ‘The Real Deal’ or ‘The Hen’s Teeth’

This is the goal.  Credible services that work and are visible and accessible to the people they are intended to serve.  Likely to have  a low marketing overhead as word of mouth and the power of attraction will keep the clients coming.  Well evidenced, high value for money services mean that funders cannot afford to withdraw from it.

High Accessibility/Visibility but Low Credibility – ‘All Mouth and No Trousers’ or ‘The Emperor…has no clothes’

This is the norm.  Sadly.  PR companies on large retainers to buy square inches in the local press.  Social media strategies, web sites, leaflets, posters and inspirational strap lines and branding guidelines abound.  Every one knows it’s there – but most of us know it doesn’t do ‘what it says on the tin’…The service relies on heavy self promotion to find a continual source of new referrals.  Word of mouth strategies including introductions and referrals don’t work.  They often have to rely on ‘inducements’ such as soft loans, grants and free lunches to get people to ‘sort of’ engage.  They can have plenty of clients on the books but few of them do anything very interesting.  Failure rates are high.  Many new entrepreneurs soon fall out of love with their ‘dream’ businesses and loan default rates are high.  Often have lots of front line staff on the ground all looking for ‘good’ clients.  Added value is low.  Management strategies involve efforts to ‘bluster our way through’ until the funding stream ends.

High Credibility/Utility but Low Visibility – ‘The Hidden Gem’

So we have a great product and service that does the job – but people don’t know we are here.  Don’t worry about it – this situation won’t last for long – perhaps 6 months?   If you have a product/service that reliably and consistently does what it says it will do – transforms lives, starts dream businesses and contributes to economic and community development the word will get out.  In fact you will soon be winning prizes and if you are smart making serious money.  Perhaps give a little thought to promoting a word of mouth strategy – learn how to ask for referrals, and introductions and you will soon have them beating a path to your door.  Make sure you can evidence your effectiveness and trademark/copyright your service.  It is worth a bomb.  This is a great place to be….

Low Credibility and Low Visibility – ‘No Style – No Substance’

Actually not as bad as it sounds.  Perhaps most new enterprise services should recognise that this is the starting point and where we might spend most of the first year or two of a new project.  Learning about what works in a particular community, about which partners are the ‘real deal’ and which are ‘all mouth but no trousers’.  Sniffing out the hidden gems to work with.  By deliberately keeping a low profile, but working on the long term impact of our products and services with a modest volume of clients we can gradually build a great service.  Once we have moved into the ‘hidden gem’ category we can then make the transition to become the ‘real deal’.

Working with Stakeholders

Of course when we use this in our own services we tend to have a bias towards the ‘real deal’ and ‘hidden gem’ quadrants.  But if we ask our clients, our funders, our experienced advisers, or an informed outsider to place us in the matrix then the results can be enlightening and provide powerful clues about the way forward – if we are smart enough and honest enough to listen.

  • Is this matrix useful?
  • Are you in the quadrant that you want to be in?
  • Do you have a clear strategy for getting to be the real deal?


Helping that Helps…

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I have been thinking some more about ‘helping styles that help’.  Many services that purport to ‘help’ appear to be helpful on the surface, but often leave clients more dependent on experts to help them with decision-making in the future, rather than less. We achieve a net loss in ‘enterprise’ rather than a net gain. Or we deliver the bureaucratic requirements of our service while leaving things substantially unchanged.

Every interaction offers us possibilities to help or hinder the development of clients (and ourselves). For some years now I have trained a person centred approach based on 4 styles of intervention intended to help advisers/coaches to think about how they can use every interaction to both strengthen their relationship with the client and to move the change process along:

  1. acceptant (getting them the client talk and to acknowledge feelings and emotions as well as facts)
  2. catalytic (introducing models, theories and concepts that help the client to see the wood for the trees, to recognise patterns and ‘make their own sense’ of the information they have available to them
  3. confrontational (challenging the client when words and actions seem to lack coherence – when they appear to be acting against their own self interest)
  4. prescriptive (telling clients what they should or should not do – a very common subset of this is called ‘veiled prescription’ for example ‘Have you thought about calling Business Link?’ which is really a prescription disguised as a question.

These four styles are then used in conjunction with what I call the enterprise coaching cycle. This starts with initial contact/gaining entry (winning the permission of the client to help; crossing the threshold at which the client ‘invites’ us to work with them on exploring options and plans). It then goes through contracting, data collection and option generation phases (all led by the client with the coach in the role of facilitator in nearly all occasions), option selection, planning, implementation and then either exiting or re-contracting for a further cycle of support.

In practice many of the people I train recognise that their ability to help is limited by the extent to which they can effectively ‘gain entry’. They are often not trusted as being ‘on the side of the client’. Gaining entry is a challenge because as it cannot be done on the basis of expertise and power (the usual starting point?) but on the basis of trustworthiness and intent.  Without gaining entry we can go through the motions of a helping relationship and tick most of the right boxes but nothing substantially shifts.

When working with coaches and advisers I have had to do quite a lot of work to decrease the amount of prescription that goes on and to increase the amount of acceptant work. This is usually resisted until advisers experience the style helping them with one of their own real life challenges. Even then they will habitually revert back to advising each other – even when they know from personal experience that ‘prescription’ is often almost useless as a helping style! There is a challenge of learning new techniques and skills, but the main challenge is unlearning old habits!

There is also often a resistance in case what the client really wants to work on reflects neither the coaches’ expertise nor the remit of their project.

I have also done quite a lot of work with advisers and coaches on ‘self directed learning’ which draws heavily on reflective practice techniques and helps them to build personalised learning support mechanisms. One of the unintended consequences of the standards based approach to professional development has been emphasis on the collection and collation of evidence that criteria are met rather than genuine reflection and the creative development of professional practice.

Another challenge has been to get advisers/coaches to be genuinely client centred, rather than centred on either the solutions that they have up their sleeves (workshops that have been commissioned and need filling, managed workspaces that need the same, existing services provided by ‘partners’) or the outcomes that draw down their funding (steering people towards business start ups, VAT registrations or training places – because they count as ‘success’ in the terms of the funder).

Working on the front-line of service delivery leads to challenges further up the supply chain. This includes helping service managers/designers to balance the tensions between client centredness and outcomes that funders demand. In my experience this balance is nearly ALWAYS struck on the side of the funder rather than the client which often dilutes the potential of the service as we cannot gain entry if we are more concerned in gaining outcomes for the funder than helping the client on their agenda. There is also the challenge of helping funders to recognise that they are much more likely to achieve their outcomes if they fund person centred support rather than policy centred ‘advice and guidance’. Work is required in all these areas if we are to make a real shift in the system and its efficacy.

I am not sure if this stream of consciousness will add anything to the analysis of the challenges in developing enterprise coaching as an impactful and cost-effective practice, but I hope it shows that I have perhaps some of the pieces of the puzzle that may help to shift things a little at both theoretical and practical levels, both at the front-line of service delivery and the design and management of services.

If any of this may be relevant to your work then please do give me a shout.

Portfolios and Metrics for Enterprise Coaching

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  • What sort of numbers is it realistic to expect a full-time enterprise coach to deliver?
  • What does a healthy coach portfolio look like?
  • If I employ 5 coaches to work in  city of 750 000, what sort of results should I expect?

Well here are my thoughts….

The basic unit of coaching is the 121.  Each 121 will usually take between 45 minutes to an hour.  Of course they can take longer – but this is rarely productive.

121s are intense, often emotional and usually challenging.  If they are aren’t, you are not doing it right!  This means that a coach can do on average 3 x 121s in a day.  This should mean that they can deliver well in excess of 600 personal coaching sessions in a year – 650+ is not beyond the realms of possibility.  Of course geography matters – if clients are scattered across Northumberland you will spend more time travelling than if you coach in an urban centre.

I would expect to see a coach working with about 200 unique clients in the course of a year.  Yes, three or so new clients coming onto the portfolio each week!  I would expect to see each coach working with a catchment area of between 15 and 50 000 residents depending on population density and other demographics.

The one hit wonders

A proportion of clients will come once and may not return for months or years, if ever.  We may have helped them enormously.  We may not have helped them at all.   We may never know – although if you are visible and accessible enough and they stay in the area you should be able to get some feedback.  I have known clients who were clear on what they wanted to do after just one session and went and did it.  In fact one client called me after 3 years and said that he had started his business and now wanted to expand – would I like to have a chat!  Others just don’t come back when they recognise that:

  1. I am not in the business of giving them money or pulling magic rabbits out of hats
  2. They will have to do some work on this – it is not an easy option

The percentage that fall into this category can vary widely usually depending on the kind of marketing used to promote the service.  If the marketing says ‘We can make your dreams come true’, ‘Funding available’, ‘Lunch provided’ or some combination of the above then the number of one hit wonders will be high.  Where marketing is through word of mouth, real clients telling others about what the service is really like and what it has helped them to achieve then they should be much lower.  Effective word of mouth depends on your service being quite literally ‘remarkable’ and you being prepared to actively ask clients for introductions and referrals.  If they are not happy to give you these it is likely that your service is just not good enough.

If the number of one hit wonders creeps much above 25% I would be wondering about whether we had problems with our marketing and reputation – or whether the coach was just not able to connect with the client group.

The Ideal Clients

In some ways the ideal clients are the one hit wonders who just go and do it, start a business, and return years later to look at business expansion.  But these are rare, and often can’t be counted for funding purposes!  The real ideal client engages with us, takes seriously the notion of doing work between meetings and returns for subsequent visits to make further progress.  We can build a strong relationship with them and provide much more support to them in developing their ideas and skills.  We can also start to see a story emerge about our own effectiveness.  We can record the progress the client has made and provide high quality quantitative and qualitative information on our effectiveness to funders.  Such ideal clients will typically require between 3 and 6 121 sessions over the course of anything from several weeks to 6 months or more.  I would hope to see good coaches with some 50%, or 110 plus clients each year.  Of these I would be expecting around 15- 20 clients to actually go ahead and start their business from anything within 4 months of the first 121 up to a few years after the first meeting.  There is much to be said for slow enterprise.  I would certainly expect a good, established coach, working in an effective system, to support anywhere between 15 and 20 or so starts each year.

I would expect upwards of 80% of these new starts to be trading 3 years later.  Survival rates should always be very carefully tracked, and serious consideration given by both the coach and the service as a whole as to how they can be maintained and improved.   Helping clients to start businesses that they have not got either the commitment or skills to manage effectively  or for which there is not a sufficient market to sustain will only help to set back the reputation of the service and the enterprise culture of the community.  However attractive it might be to get another start-up box ticked we should be doing all can to slow our clients down until they really have the very best chance of long term survival.  A much smaller number of really strong startups is worth much more to the long term enterprise culture of the community than a rash of sickly ones.  I only wish funding regimes would recognise this.

Anything significantly less than this would set my alarm bells ringing that all is not right.  The problem might be with the coach, with the enterprise coaching system (including marketing and administration), or with the enterprise culture in the community.  The coach cannot do this on their own.  There needs to be a substantial network of pro-enterprise individuals who can provide additional support and provide an effective counter the negative messages about enterprise that often pervade communities.

While the other 85 perhaps don’t start a business I would expect each of them to have been significantly assisted by the coaching process to clarify goals and learn how to be much more enterprising in their pursuit.  These outcomes are valuable and should be recorded and wherever possible paid for (or at least reported to) by the appropriate funder.

The Demanding Clients

So this leaves us with perhaps 25% of our clients, 40 or so in the course of nay one year, who are really demanding.  They need more than half a dozen 121 sessions.  Perhaps they are starting from a long way back and need many 121s over a period of years before they start to make substantial changes – or decide to stick with the status quo.  They may need referring to specialist service providers before our coaches can do much more with them.  Perhaps they just like to spend time with coaches, fooling themselves and others that they are really working for a better future.  Demanding clients may just need a higher level of support – live with it – or they may be a sign that actually a coach is promoting dependence, happy to keep working with clients who won’t make progress because they can just count the sessions.

The actual dynamics of a coach’s portfolio will vary depending on the geography, psychology and enterprise culture of the community they serve as well as their own experience and longevity on the patch.  It may take a couple of years to achieve a stable portfolio of the type I have outlined here.

It will also depend on the type of marketing support they receive.  Often well intentioned marketing activities can produce floods of clients that need to be seen, but who turn out to be one hit wonders of the worst kind.  I am a big advocate of expecting enterprise coaches to develop their own referrals through word of mouth from existing clients, perhaps augmented with a little bit bit of judicious PR.  Expensive advertising campaigns may attract punters to one off events and workshops but are much less effective at actually finding people who really want to work effectively and intensively with enterprise coaches.

The Role of the Manager in Supporting Enterprise Coaches

Call me a traditionalist but I think that the manager has a key role in both supporting the coach to develop an effective portfolio.  Each coach should be seen ideally every week, certainly fortnightly to review the portfolio and the progress that is being made by specific clients.  Ratios of one hit wonders to ideal clients to demanding clients should be tracked for clues about the performance of the coach and the system that they are operating in.  Where specific clients are providing cause for concern (insufficient progress is being made, specialist services are requires that are beyond the boundaries of the coaching service, client behaviours are causing concern for example) explicit strategies should be developed for managing them effectively.  At least three or four times a year the manager should observe the coach at work, accompanying them on 121s and providing them with feedback and coaching support.

Closing Remarks

Getting an enterprise coaching service to work really well takes years rather than months.  Coaches have to become known, trusted and skilled.  Marketing strategies have to be honed.  The numbers I have mentioned here are achievable but not in all situations and never instantly.  They have to be built towards with intelligence, insight and dedication.  Sadly, funding regimes often encourage us to take the expensive and unproductive short cuts of putting adverts on buses, building flashy websites and holding conferences and expos with dragons, apprentices, millionaires and free lunches just to get punters through the door.

But it is not any punters that we need. It is those who believe, because of our reputation and our track record, that we can help them to use enterprise to transform their lives for the better.

Warming the Cockles of Enterprising Hearts

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I recently ran some 2 hour workshops for staff at Wakefield College where steps are being undertaken to ‘Embed Enterprise’ across the curriculum.  I got some lovely feedback about the sessions:

  • Enjoyable structure to lesson; enterprise from another angle.
  • Great presenter learnt a lot of new ideas of how enterprise can be embedded across the college.
  • Good varied discussion; topic was quite thought provoking, good and interesting speaker.
  • Inspirational; thought provoking.
  • Really helped me understand the concept of enterprise, both personally and to help the adults I work with.
  • Interactive: Thought provoking
  • Very interesting presenter, stimulating & thought provoking, it flew by.
  • Session leader engaging, funny, and interesting – actually had something important to say.
  • Excellent input led by an interesting person who has credibility and vision.
  • Motivational speaker, clear messages, fun! Message matured my view of what teaching is about.
  • Right messages about enterprise, good pace, good balance of theory and anecdote, good understanding of issues in FE.
  • Stimulating, helped me look at my position at college in a slightly more “empowered way”.
  • Thought provoking, lots of ideas I would like to follow up on / research (if time permits).
  • Food for thought, helped me to basically understand the role of enterprise, training and business has to fill the gap not the need.  A really good session.
  • Flexible, great knowledge, inspiring.
  • Fab delivery, stimulating ideas I’d really like the power points and any refs etc.
  • Brilliant!…….. really interesting, interactive.
  • Variety,  fantastic thanks.
  • Very interesting, good tutor, good use of IT.
  • Interactive excellent, provoking thoughts, highlighted further development, how to manage entrepreneurship.  Team sessions with staff about developing enterprise.
  • Varied session covering a wide topic.  Encouraged reflection on own practice and future role in college.
  • Made us think, interactive, quite moving at times.
  • Very thought provoking, interesting topics and examples, well presented.
  • Good depth.
  • Fantastic delivery, so useful and incredibly inspiring.  Very relevant and realistic, thoroughly enjoyable.
  • (Strengths), presenter and activities, style personality knowledge.

Do get in touch if your team could do with the cockles of their enterprise hearts warming.