“I am thoroughly enjoying my journey now”
Stephen Ward is an innovator in the legal marketplace but when his unique barristers’ chambers began to plateau after a period of initial growth, he decided to take some expert advice.
“Clerksroom is a barristers’ chambers in England and Wales. In April 2001, we changed to a limited company and what makes our chambers unique in the marketplace is that we are a commercial organisation whereas, traditionally chambers are a membership organisation. Most chambers just share expenses but we have different objectives and one of those is to make a profit for our shareholders.
Clerksroom grew rapidly and in December 2003, two and a half years into our plan, we moved into a new building. It was then that growth began to plateau and we just cruised along. The plan had lost focus as we had not set any new big objectives.
I first met my local Action Coach at a chamber of commerce seminar in September 2015 where they were giving advice about entering awards and we got talking. His first words to me were that coaching can take a good business and help make it great and what we needed in the first instance was to recognise that our business is a good business. Later he invited me for a coffee to have an exploratory chat.
Things moved quickly from there.
I found five particular areas that I struggle with. My coach tailored our one-to-one coaching to those areas and that carried through to GrowthCLUB, where many of the business owners he coaches come together and we look at our 90-day plans.
Our coach doesn’t tell you how to run the business, he identifies where you have a gap and he helps you plug that gap with learnings.
We’ve gone from planning to borrow £30,000 to enable growth to identifying £130,000 of savings in the budget this year. We’ve gone from not having a handle on our KPIs to building bespoke Test & Measure Software that gives us real time conversion rates, lead source, geography of sale per transaction so that we can work out an accurate return on investment
