Coaching and Consultancy Sessions
These sessions are delivered by Helen Thomson on behalf of The Accountancy Practice. We have used Helen’s services to fine tune what we are doing as a business and as a result want to offer her considerable knowledge and insight to our clients.
Helen is a lively, outgoing but empathetic award winning business skills trainer and consultant, having helped business for the last thirty years, both as a trainer for tailored in house groups and was one of the first Investors In People assessors when the standard was first introduced in the 90’s.
Her straight talking approach perfectly complements ours and her ability to come up with workable and straightforward solutions, avoiding jargon and fuss, is a benefit to our clients. She has the ability to ask the right questions, keep things simple and to see the whole picture. Helen’s broad background means she can incorporate the marketing and sales elements, company vision and values and related staffing and system issues into her solutions which can be so tricky to embrace, creating an integrated approach which makes sense.
Here’s the ‘menu’ from which you can choose sessions to help you and your business. The outlines below are to give you an idea. Each session is tailored free of charge to make sure it’s of maximum benefit to you. If you are on the Silver package, you can pick one of these sessions within the package cost. If you are on Gold, you can pick two. Beyond that, you can pay for the sessions as stand alone services.
1. Organisational Roles Review and Tailored Staff Appraisal system
• Build a simple but effective organisational chart, identifying roles and responsibilities to avoid time wasting, duplication of effort or ‘gaps’ where mistakes happen
• Introduction of Core Competencies and Key Skills, the critical areas where you team make a difference to your business and where their responsibilities lie
• Creation of simple appraisal/review system for keeping your staff on track in a non confrontational way, helping you monitor and identify areas for improvement.
• Three hours duration for initial meeting, followed by Appraisal system and simple job roles created and sent over to client
• Online or phone support.
2. Company Vision and Core Values
• What does your company represent to the people who pay for your services?
• How does this tie in with your reason for running your business?
• What is a clear vision you can share which meets both your needs?
• Identify your key message, your brand and company vision and develop your core values which will be embraced by everyone involved in delivering your service. These need to be consistent and ‘make sense’ and will underpin the marketing message which people will associate with you and your business.
• Three hour meeting plus report created for client with the outcomes.
3. Your Marketing Plan
Works very well in conjunction with Company Vision and Core Values session above
• What are you in business to deliver?
• Who are your desired customers / your ideal customer profile?
• What kind of work you’d like to do more (or less) of?
• How you can reach them?
• Your Marketing Plan may have changed since you started in business or indeed, your business may have evolved and a marketing strategy was never considered at the outset.
• This session involves suggestions regarding social media or paid for promotion
• We will agree on a plan for achieving your goals, be it generating more new clients or/and improving customer retention or referrals, and the actions you will need to take to achieve them.
4. Sales and Customer Service Coaching
• One day one to one session or with a group of up to four of your team, ideally held on your premises to avoid unnecessary travel time lost and enable your business to be responsive during the coffee break
• Pick from one of three key areas, Telephone Sales, Face to Face Selling and Customer Service and Retention
• The coaching is geared to your business, tailored during a complimentary meeting or phone call
• Key outcomes are agreed with you
• All staff taking part receive a phone call from the trainer to find out their personal thoughts and needs from the session
• A tailored training manual is created specially for you, addressing the specific objections and ‘blocks’ you come across when selling to new clients, meeting new clients or developing relationships with your existing clients.
• Unlimited access to trainer for follow up
5. Leadership Skills
• Does your business rely on your decision making day in day out? Have you expanded but really, while there’s more people delivering your dream, sometimes they are held back because they need your say so?
• Empowering staff, especially in a family run business, with all the inevitable historical hierarchy is inherently tricky, and at what point does delegation descend into abdication of responsibility?
• How much ‘power’ are you able to share, without losing your position as ‘leader’?
• What do you need to give away and how can you enable your team to make decisions that will increase the size of the business?
• One to one tailored coaching (face to face), with built in phone or email follow up which will be tailored to help focus and support you for as long or as short a time as you are feeling the benefit.
6. Personal Development
• Running a business calls on a completely different skill set to that of simply doing the job.
• Perhaps you are feeling as it you are frequently pulled in different directions and it’s hard to know how you are going to fit everything in.
• When things are hard, it’s usual to worry about the business and this has a knock on effect of raising stress and reducing effectiveness and decision making.
• This session is tailored to meet your particular needs but can include time management and prioritisation, motivation, negotiation and boundary setting.
Contact us
Please get in touch if you are interested in any of our services and are ready to get started, or just want to find out more. Our direct contact details can be found below, or see more on our contact page.