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Enterprise Growth Workshops

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This spring we are introducing a brand new workshop as well as repeating our very well received ‘Introduction to Enterprise Coaching‘ and ‘Marketing Enterprise‘ workshops.  The new workshop ‘Approaches to Enterprise‘ is a full and fast moving day that introduces powerful and proven interventions that will help you help your clients accelerate and maintain their progress.  The workshop covers:

  • The Transtheoretical Model – Prochaska and DiClemente
  • Motivational Interviewing
  • The Solutions Focussed Approach
  • Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) for Enterprise
  • GROWing and GRINning – powerful coaching models
  • Learned Optimism – Challenging Self-Talk
  • Achievement Goal Theory
  • Self Directed Learning

With a short introduction to each technique and its psychological grounding, we will put the emphasis on how you can apply what you learn to help your clients make rapid progress.

‘Approaches to Enterprise‘ will be held on March 23rd in Leeds.  You can find out more about this event and reserve your place here.  Book before February 27th and save £50.

In ‘An Introduction to Enterprise Coaching‘ we teach an approach to enterprise support that starts from the premise that we advise and advocate far too much and listen and enquire far too little.  As a result we often weaken our clients ability to solve their own problems and actually make them less enterprising as a result.  The workshop introduces a tried and tested Enterprise Coaching process model and a range of four different styles of coaching.  This gives a solid and comprehensive theoretical underpinning to inform your practice with clients.

Enterprise Coaching Dates

March 6th, London – £349 or £299 if you book before Feb 14th
March 18th, Leeds – £299 or £249 if you book before Feb 19th

‘Marketing Enterprise‘ is a one day workshop designed to help you to improve your effectiveness in attracting enterprise clients.  The workshop covers:

  • What is Social Marketing and Why it Matters to Enterprise Professionals
  • Developing Marketing Collateral that Might Just Work
  • Learning from Current Practice
  • Developing Market Segments that Work
  • Strangers, Prospects and Customers
  • How to Build a Word of Mouth Strategy
  • Using Gatekeepers to Reach the Market

‘Marketing Enterprise‘ will be held on March 27th in London.  The workshop costs £349 per person.  Book before Feb 21st and save £50 – pay just £299 per person.

If you would like to:

  • know more about any of these programmes
  • run them in house or in a different location, or
  • negotiate a discount for multiple bookings

then please do get in touch.

Development as Freedom

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While it is important to distinguish conceptually the notion of poverty as capability inadequacy from that of poverty as lowness of income, the two perspectives cannot but be related, since income is such an important means to capabilities.  And since enhanced capabilities in leading a life would tend, typically, to expand a person’s ability to be more productive and earn a higher income, we would also expect a connection going from capability improvement to greater earning power and not the other way around.

The latter connection can be particularly important for the removal of income poverty.  It is not only the case that, say, better basic education and health care improve the quality of life directly; they also increase a person’s ability to earn an income and be free of income poverty as well.

Development as Freedom (p90) – Amartya Sen

Building the Entrepreneurial Team

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One of the most powerful and effective things we can do for our clients is to help them to think really hard about how they build the full range of skills and passion that their enterprise is going to need if it is to really work well.

It will need a managing director – someone to work on the business rather than in it.  Someone who can make objective decisions for the benefit of the organisation.

It will need someone who is passionate and knowledgeable about the product or service, someone who is passionate about marketing and sales and someone who loves doing the books and preparing financial projections and cases for investment.

  • Can your client really fulfil all these demands?
  • Will they?
  • Or will they default to doing the stuff that they love most?

If they do then at least one vital part of their business will be stunted – and that will be enough to bring them down.

Even if we train the entrepreneur to do everything this problem will develop – because they will always be drawn towards the work that they love – and away from the work that they hate – no matter how important it is to the success of the business.

The biggest favour that we can do them is to help them to build a team that they trust, where other in the team love to do the bits that they hate.

If we don’t do this then it might be easy for us to diagnose the problem (your financial management is weak) and to make a recommendation (why don’t you spend more time on it?) but we will be wasting our breath.  If they don’t love financial management they are not going to do it well.

So why do so few advisers actively encourage entrepreneurs to build a team before they write their business plan?

Do you?

Learned Helplessness

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If you keep a predatory fish, such as a pike, in an aquarium it will display normal healthy predator behaviours.  Put a prey fish in and a hungry pike will attack and swallow it in the blink of an eye.

If you use a glass wall to divide the aquarium in half, with the pike on one side and a prey fish on the other, then the pike will pursue the prey fish again.  But this time it just smacks into the glass and gets a painful bang on the head for its trouble.  No matter!  It regroups, attacks again and ‘crack’ the same result – a whole load of pain and no gain.

After a while the pike learns that going for the prey fish is not such a smart move.  Chasing what you want just ends in failure and pain.  You can even remove the glass wall from the tank, surround the starving pike with prey fish and it still will not attack.  It has learned helplessness.

There is a lot of learned helplessness out there.  A lot of people who used to have dreams and aspirations, but in pursuing them have just got pain and no gain.  Painful experiences and memories from school, parents and peers who do not believe in them and perhaps a history of redundancy and unemployment.  You can dangle ‘opportunities’ in front of them and still they will not grab them.  They have learned that this will only end in pain – and no gain.  Learned helplessness.

And ‘advice’ even well meaning, technically competent and powerful advice will not help.  In fact it will hinder – it will reinforce the idea that they are somehow deficient.  That if they were OK they would not be in this situation.  It reinforces the helplessness.

So what does work?  Knowing someone who believes in you – unconditionally.  Who encourages you to pick yourself up, learn the lesson and move on.  Someone who has faith in you and wants to see you become the wonderful person that you have the potential to become.  Someone who does not preach or advise but just helps you to grow – and to keep growing.  Someone who puts your well-being at the top of the agenda – and their contracted outputs much lower down.  A facilitator, a coach, a true friend who will help tackle the real barriers to progress – not just the technical challenges to be overcome but the personal ones too.

Facilitating The Power of Faith and Belief

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Imagine a client who is about to commit him/herself to a significant investment in a new business.  The market does not seem to be there.  The finance is not yet in place.  The business (from any logical rational perspective) looks like a money pit.

Yet they know they can make it work.  They can see the business in its final form.  They know that they will find a way.  They just need to commit to it.  So they make the investment.  They burn their bridges.  There is no going back.  They have to find a way.

Enterprise Based on Faith or a Plan?
Enterprise Based on Faith or a Plan?

You ask them why they are so sure that the business will work.  They answer,

“I just know it will work – I can feel it in my bones”

or perhaps

“God told me to do this – he will find a way”

or

“I know it is a risk – but it is a risk that I comfortable to take”.

Now just suppose they are the Head of Sony on the brink of launching the Walkman – even though all the business anlaysts were screaming – DON’T DO IT.  Or imagine your client is Rupert Murdoch, about to launch Sky Sports – even though the market research says that overwhelmingly people will not pay to watch football matches on satellite TV.

Now imagine it is a local person about to launch into their first enterprise – no financial reserves to fall back on.

  • How would you handle the situation?
  • What would you say?
  • What would you do?
  • Who else might you involve?

If you manage a support service – how would you want your advisers and coaches to handle it?