Mark Wood – Charleswood Property Developments Limited
When we met Stuart, the challenges of the business were quite significant. We’d reached a time in its life where it was consuming a great deal of my time and we were unsure which direction to take. Whether to scale back and reduce the number of staff, or whether to move forward and look at growing the company and moving forward but that was quite a daunting challenge at the time.
Since working with Stuart, we’ve found there’s been a great deal of improvement in the company. We are now far more organised and systemised. It became very apparent that a great deal of information relating to the company and the general day to day running was stored in my head. With Stuart’s help, we’ve started to extract that and put it into documents and systemised procedures that actually work. So now that workload has been taken on by other individuals, it has freed a great deal of my time up, allowing us to work on the business rather than being totally consumed in the business.
To grow our business, Stuart has helped us implement a number of new strategies: marketing, growth planning, time management and conversion rate. Our conversion rate has increased from 15% to 45% now.
Attending the 90 day planning workshops have been extremely beneficial, the whole process is very inspirational. It focuses you, it gets you away from the business for a day. Just to have the goals set and something that you can look at, refer to and work to every day we find to be extremely useful. That’s passed on to all the staff and we have regular meetings where we update everybody on our targets and whether we’ve reached them and at what point we’re at.
The networking opportunities are great and Stuart and his team take time to introduce you to like minded professionals where you can build synergies and grow relationships. We’ve benefited a great deal from that and set up new working relationships with quite a number of people. We have picked up referral business up on a number of occasions now.
Our business and personal life has changed a great deal and we’re starting to see the rewards from that now. From a personal point of view, it’s released a great deal of my time. I’m far more in control of the business. We feel we’re moving forward in the right direction. And as a result of that, I have more time to spend with my family and pursuing my own interests away from the business. So the whole experience is extremely rewarding. As difficult as it may be at times and demanding, we do feel it’s a very positive approach. Stuart’s a great coach in our opinion but he expects a great deal in return as well. But if you deliver, he’ll certainly support you all the way through.
After three months, we are beginning to notice a return on our investment and whilst it’s still very early days, it’s an investment that I feel is very well worthwhile. And in time it is certainly going to pay off.
