Today's podcast episode is from my Directions for Directors 🧠  series where Ryan Cunningham and I had the pleasure of chatting with our guest Rory Underwood MBE, former RAF Flight Lieutenant,  England’s highest ever rugby try scorer, and Director of Wingman. 
 
Rory shares insights gained from his rugby and Royal Air Force career on what's required to accelerate business growth, and why training helps teams fly higher and faster with less effort. 
 
In our talk about ‘creating a performance environment as you scale’ we discuss;

• The challenges that businesses experiencing growth face
• The well-trodden path where an entrepreneurial founder has to shift roles dramatically as their business experiences growth to deal with staff, process, and the ‘day to day’ stuff
• How there's no ‘magic number’ of revenue or staff for when its the time to start formalising your processes but its when everyone in the organisation can’t hear the same conversation
• Why the cheapest way for any organisation is to develop from within - but every now and again you have to bring in someone from outside
• Getting both communication and culture right to find the winning formula

Rory uses comparisons from rugby, flying, and business to describe performance training environments. 

"Rugby is 1 hour 20 mins game on a Saturday - so you could argue that 90% of [a players] time  is training, and 10% of the time is the doing - playing the match".

“When flying, we don’t just turn up and fly a jet...when I talk about the military, it’s a training organisation. We train, and train, and train, to get ready to go to war. And even when we go to war we still think about training because the enemy are trying to adapt and workout ways of overcoming us. So again, 90% of the time is training, and 10% of the time is doing”. 

“So if you take the context of business, what would you do with those figures...most people say it's the other way around...and I’m not advocating that you should spending 90% of your time on training and planning before doing, because you don't...but if organisations say that they want to be a world class business with world class people then there’s budget and time to be spent on developing your people”.

Rory shares a huge amount of takeaways in this conversation for founders and directors at all stages of their leadership journey on how to build the sustainable, high-performance environments required to deliver their goals and release the full potential of their people.

Thanks go to Rory, Laura Taylor and Jane McClelland from the Wingman team, and David Wafer Chair of Institute of Directors for LCR for the superb recommendation and organising.  
 
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Email podcast@i-com.net to work with David and Ryan to grow your ecommerce store.

Struggling to build a strong recruitment brand that will help you register the top talent? Thinking about how to find your place in a crowded market and differentiate yourself from the competition?
 
Ryan and I had the pleasure of sitting down with Dave Madden the Owner and Director of Mustard, the International recruitment agency for the design sector  🙌🏼   
 
In today’s podcast episode from my Rules for Recruiters 🧠  series we explore;

• Why naming the business was the initial spark 
• How investing in the Mustard brand allowed them to grow beyond the three founders quickly
• How to stand out against the competition with a visual identity 
• How the brand was the foundations for building out their foreign desks and communicating the company culture locally
• Why having a stable of sub-brands in highly specialised ‘inch wide, mile deep’ niches helped grow the business

Dave explains how they wanted the brand to mirror their ideal clients both in person with jeans and collarless tee-shirts, as well as the digital world so when they visit the mustard website they say “these look and feel a bit like us, and can interact with us on our level”.  
 
In this interview, Dave talks about his experience as someone with 21 years in the recruitment sector and has some great advice for anyone else thinking of building a brand in a particular niche.  
 
Never miss a future episode, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts to be notified when a new episode is published. 

Email podcast@i-com.net to work with David and Ryan to grow your recruitment agency.

Today's podcast episode is from my Directions for Directors 🧠  series where Ryan and I had the pleasure of chatting with our guest Barry Leahey MBE, CEO at playdale.co.uk. 

Barry is an award winner for leadership, turnaround, export & manufacturing, as well as featuring in The Telegraph’s Top 50 Most Ambitious UK Business Leaders. 

This episode, which goes under the title of ‘expertise in innovation and leadership’ describes how Barry Leahey became the first external MD of a ninth-generation family business. 

The family run business which originally dates to 1735, having had many changes over the years as it has progressed from a coopers, hoopers, and timber merchants, before evolving into the international playground equipment manufacturing company Playdale Playgrounds in 1978. 

Barry’s vision has again transformed the company – its gone from a domestic business selling playground equipment to an international supplier now exporting to 51 countries and increased the turnover by 300%. 

Ryan and I talk to Barry and discover;

• How he moved away from a 'spray and pray’ approach to marketing and began measuring the ROI on all marketing to find out what's actually working 
• Why sales and marketing is a science rather than ‘just blustering your way through’
• Why their marketing spend is virtually the same as it was in 2004 and they get 400% more leads - all because they adopted digital very early doors 
• Why their growth strategy was to commercialise the business and to be a little bit less nice 
• The necessity for creating a culture of being accountable
• His thoughts on adopting a culture of ‘fail fast’ 
• Why being curious helps to be on the front foot all the time with digital marketing trends 
• The importance of getting systems and processes in place before scaling to Europe and ROW 
• His thoughts on self-belief and personal development

In this inspiring interview, Barry also talks about joining Jon Dutton and Jonathan Neill on the business advisory supporting the RLWC2021 (Rugby League World Cup which launches later this year in October 2021) to build engagement and best practice as part of the tournament’s commercial strategy. 

Never miss a future episode, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts to be notified when a new episode is published. 

Email podcast@i-com.net to work with David and Ryan to grow your ecommerce store.