Not everyone in learning and development has either run businesses or studied how to develop people. I have done both, in that order, and that is the whole point of how I work.
I spent thirty years in commercial leadership, starting as a sales executive and working up to Regional Director at Ford Retail, with full profit and loss responsibility for 22 stores, more than 750 people, and a turnover of £388 million. So when I work with your managers and leaders, I understand the pressures they are under, because I have been under them too. I do not coach from theory alone. I coach from experience.
Since 2013 I have delivered training, coaching and facilitation full time, and in 2019 I bought GMD People, a business that has been developing people since 2001. It is owner-led, so the person you talk to is the person you work with.
That experience spans sectors, retail, healthcare, technology, professional services and more, because the thing I really work on travels. Communication, dealing with people, and getting the best from them, that is the same everywhere. Strategy changes by industry. People do not. What makes a team perform is the same whether you are in automotive, the NHS, or a tech start up.
That belief sits beneath everything I do. What interests me is changing how people perform, by working on the inner conversation first, the beliefs and habits quietly setting the ceiling, and then building the skill on top, so the change actually lasts.
I have come to believe high performance follows the same equation wherever you find it. Mindset, knowledge turned into skill, personal work rate, agility and resilience, and you have to be consistently good at all of them. That is as true in business as it is on a start line.
I am a qualified athletics coach, and I still compete as a sprinter at national and international level, with over thirty national medals and top ten European rankings along the way.
Sport is where I test what I teach, and where a good deal of it comes from. I take what builds winning teams in business and use it to coach athletes, and I take what creates champions in sport and bring it back into business. They dovetail, because the principles do not care which arena you are in. It is also why I practise what I sell. I have a coach myself, because nobody reaches their best entirely alone.
If there is one habit behind how I approach any situation, it is this. I do not start in the past. I start with the future.
First I ask what the future needs to look like here, what good actually is in this situation.
Then I go to the past, not to dwell, but to learn, what worked before, and what needs adjusting.
That leaves me in the present, prepared, with a plan, ready to put in the work that shapes the future I want, rather than simply reacting to the moment.
The future sets the direction. The past informs it. The present is where you deliver. It is a simple discipline, and the one I return to most, for myself and with the people I work with.
A 20 minute conversation. A chance to talk through what you are trying to achieve, see whether I am the right person to help, and work out where you might start.
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