“The business feels stronger”
Aqua Cooling Solutions is the UK’s leading specialist in industrial process cooling and associated products and services. Based in Hampshire, they have been operating since 2001 and have just had their most profitable year in over 10 years.
Company founder Kevin Lancaster explains why they decided to use ActionCOACH.
“My business partner, Simon, and I had a great combination of experience in both cooling engineering management and sales when we first started the company. Growth was good and this just plateaued during the recession. We weren’t worried about the business and were confidently holding our head above water.
Other issues, such as people management, had started to become a headache. Day by day, we were beginning to feel less enthused about going to work.
The idea of using a business coach hadn’t occurred to us but our accountant knows our local ActionCOACH and I arranged to meet him during a game of golf.
During our eighteen holes, he wanted to understand what my business was all about and I liked his views on transitioning from being self employed to becoming a business owner. He could understand how we had come from developing our own company and how we’d had to learn on-the-hoof. He gave a few suggestions on our options to move the business forward and suggested putting preventative measures in place to combat the recent difficulties we’d been experiencing.
Not only did we want to be happy to come to work every day but we wanted our staff to feel the same. We decided that we wanted to nourish our employees at work, not just pay them to be there. Our coach helped us to achieve that through focusing on good instruction within the workplace, defining clear roles for our teams, recognising individual ambitions and providing constructive feedback.
The single most significant thing for me was bringing in appraisals, ones that were formulated by us and specifically for our needs, not off-the-peg. We set charters for how people should behave at work and used these along with profiling tools during recruitment including using our new culture statement during interviews.
The orthodox structure of the business feels stronger. The separate parts of the business work better together by speaking to key people who know it is part of their role to communicate up and down.
We were recently awarded the Queen’s Award for Enterprise, the UK’s highest accolade for business success for our Aqua Leak Prevention System. I don’t think we would have considered this sort of accolade before we started to “think big” and this has opened up new geographical markets to the business including exporting to the Middle East, Africa and USA.
