Training new or experienced managers with new tools and techniques. Leaders equipped to welcome change.
Your whole team needs to be onside. We'll coach them to make that happen.
Then we can help you with your Message, Market and Media
Call us and let's work on a plan: 01256 799 999
Business Tools - to give you 'edge'

We all need to learn and sharpen new techniques and skills in our businesses. If we stop learning, we're going backwards!

Every course we write is written for you - giving you cracking ideas to be more productive.

Each course is unique, written by an expert, and updated constantly with references to latest thinking the media. It draws on years of working in and around companies large and small. There's sound academic foundation from the business gurus and then from latest thinking and experiences, ours and yours.

We're not a 'stand up and spout' company. So many courses are 'one-day wonders'. By the time you get back to your office, 95% of the course is forgotten. Does that ring a bell?

That's not how we work! We will give you working tools that you will deploy the next day.

Simply put, we're here to make you successful.

Nine courses that will change you, forever. Here are the course headers, please see below for more details.

1. Making time WORK - Wouldn't you love to have more time to think and be productive?
2. Confident Customer Service & Dealing with difficult customers
3. How to pitch - How to get your customers to buy
4. Step up to Management and Leadership
5. Leadership: Pulling Together
6. Marketing: "Who do you think you're talking to?" No one is listening!
7. Writing Content that Sticks!
8. Video Works! - Get confident! Techniques for content and personal style.
9. Presentation Skills

1. Making Time Work
Duration - 1 day

How often does your day just fizzle out, you feel brain-dead and you struggle to even recall the work you've done?

Time must work for you or your passion, interests and unscheduled interruptions will consume your productivity. This one-day course will save you 4 clear days a month by giving you a set of clever new tools and techniques guaranteed to save 20% of the working week for you and your colleagues.


What you will learn
• How to save and re-appoint 20% of your week.
• You'll learn more about yourself and your preferences, when you are you are most productive and when to let go. We'll help you follow a plan.
• How to change your emphasis each day.
• Seven time-saving tools that you'll wish you'd picked up years ago.
• Controlling your email and phone calls
• Client protocols
• We'll show you how to set 4 meeting types and set them to work, maximise time, priming, looking for signals, set and work through agendas and actions, and - whether it's your meeting, a client's or another - how to cut time by a half.
• Concentration techniques


2. Confident Customer Service - Dealing with difficult customers

Duration - I day

Is the customer always right? As long as they perceive they're right, they need your attention!
Dealing with difficult customers is always challenging and it doesn't suit a lot of people, but it must be done! It can be time-consuming and it often seems like unproductive time. In fact, the reverse is true.


What you will learn
o can merge)
• This course will help you think positively about working with difficult situations and with reverse-marketing. It will develop you and your company to stay in step, or ahead of your customers and competitors.

• The course leader, Paul Sampson, has been dealing with tricky situations for most of his life, training marketing and service teams and working with challenging customers like P&O, MI5, Home Office, Barclays, RBS, etc but also with SMBs and sole traders.

• Our 12-steps principle will give you the distinct art, skill and the tools for handling customers.

• This one-day course will help you to deal with objections and complaints and with unhappy or angry people, coaching your team, customer value, and case studies for us to work through.

• Using examples from psychology, (nothing too heavy) you will learn how to work Case Management - there is a structure but it's not over-prescriptive because it has to be about you and to work for your personal style. We'll show you how to work cases and win-back favour with clients.

• Verbal and body language styles.

• How to avoid being 'led' by the client. Contracts and how to avoid 'further action' - legal, or otherwise.

• Case Trending and reporting.

• Root Cause and Get-Well plans

• Handling complaints - Email and letter writing

• How to retain your customers and avoid bad press on social media. With hands-on practice, letters and email.

You will get good at it!


Courses may alter to suit candidates' preferences or specific requests in advance.

3. How to pitch - How to get your customers to buy

Duration - I day

You need to get in front of customers and prospects or, frankly, you don't have a business. Where there's demand, customers love to buy but hate being sold to.

You cannot learn this unique course content from Google, YouTube, etc! It matches structure with a neat set of tools to your particular style and delivery. There are no flash tricks or deceptions.


What you will learn

Buyers want honesty, proven experience, case studies, the truth about how your product will help them, then product reliability and after-sales support. We work through each of these elements.

• How to prepare, understand the prospect, set memorable first impressions, to build a credible story, what and how to deliver.
• An easy-to-remember stepped system:
• Preparation and first impressions
• How to pitch, reading the room
• Confidence through the sales structure, insightful questions
• Delivering your story - visuals, content
• Rapport. Body language, yours and theirs
• Involving your audience
• Creating understanding and belief
• Powerful questions
• Closing signals
• Looking for and handling objections
• Going for the close
• Case Studies
• Last impressions and follow-up
• Account management

Time is made to create your own formula from our template and to practice your new-found skills.



4. Step up to Management and Leadership
Management is about arranging and telling. Leadership is about nurturing and enhancing.
This course will change your perspective and bring out the best in you. It will also give you a set of tools and techniques to manage the work and lead people.
Let's face it, if you don't lead your team with clear-cut procedures, they'll make up the rules themselves.

Duration - I day Or the three-day - Expanded content work, models and formulae for managers; practical and practice, delivery, strategy and performance-related work.


What you will learn
• As you move up the ladder, your time becomes others' time so you'll need to better manage yourself
• Your business - core beliefs, values and standards - what are they?
• Planning, productivity measures, mapping and prioritising
• A set of four tools for project management (more detail and twelve tools on the 3-day course)
• Closing the gap between you and your team. Inclusion and gaining respect
• Consistency. Setting the bar
• Coaching and shaping a team to create ideas and to work with business/team targets rather than just their own
• New perspective on leading teams. Getting the best from your team experts
• Meetings - 1-2-1's and four types of meetings. Getting the best results.
• One-minute management
• Reporting - making sure you know what's going on, hotspots, trouble spots, what could 'stop the engine'?
• Decision Making & Leadership
• Crisis management
• Truth and lies
• Learning body language
• Understanding 'implicit' and 'explicit'
• Situation management, behaviour, conflict, performance management people who don't fit in and disciplinary matters.
• Winning




5. Leadership: Pulling Together

Getting the best from your team

Duration - I day

Who is it for?
Seasoned or new managers who have been assigned to a new or a large team, or those with a mixed team and who need everyone to pull together.

There's really no need to go off on an awayday and learn how to make a raft, get soaked and then slap each other on the back at the bar; this course works!

What you will learn
• How to motivate and bring your staff onside
• Gaining confidence from and for your team
• Getting the best from mixed ages, different ethnicity, gender, expertise, experience and skills.
• Under-performance - working through it
• Ideas generation, change, using special skills and expertise.
• Making Time work
• 'Getting the best from the new breed of Millennials' - new perspective from recent research
• 4 tools for work-load mapping
• Tuning and conducting your 'orchestra'
• We look at how to deal with stress and burnout


You need leaders across the whole company not just in your management team.

Excellent firms don't believe in excellence - only in constant improvement and constant change - Tom Peters





Marketing - it's all changed! A lot of the old rules don't work anymore; these tools and techniques will re-position your thinking and get you to market.


6. Marketing: "Who do you think you're talking to?" No one is listening! How well do you know your market? New course, new techniques for growing your market.

Duration - I day

Who is it for?
Companies typically with less than 10 staff who have lost their way with their market, message and media and need some new structure and thinking.

Assumed Knowledge
Some knowledge of marketing principles. You are active on social media.

What you will learn
• Your target market - profiles
• Re-evaluation of your go-to-market model, your demographics and psychographics
• Buyer types and buying behaviour
• Online and offline marketing weapons
• Outline Strategy and Planning templates
• Your website format, profiled and measured
• Competition, trends, barriers, customer retention
• Implementation
• Content - online and offline, media, message
• Creative copy-writing
• e-mail marketing
• Direct Mail
• Video
• Exhibitions - how to make them effective

Facebook Ads and Google Ads are touched on, but not in detail.


7. Writing Content that Sticks!
If you're not telling your story, who's going to read it?
Reading your market, re-thinking your story and how you need to tell it. Then, 'how do I know it's good?' - measuring your content for grammar, punctuation and readability.

Duration - I day -
Or 2 days with practical hands-on practice. Writing it, doing it!

Who is it for?
Companies typically with less than 20 staff who have run out of ideas for content and who need a fresh approach.

What you will learn
• Research formats, ideas stimulation
• Brand consistency and personality, voice and tone
• Reader types
• Avoiding writing just 'noise'
• Creating a content strategy, research and plagiarism
• 'Story stacking', hooks, subject headers, styling.
• Writing techniques and structure
• Crafting, cutting and dicing powerful content
• Straplines and subject headers
• Dual readership
• How to measure content quality
• Press releases
• Social Media



8. Video Works! - Get confident! Techniques for content and personal style.

Duration - I day

Or 2 days with practical hands-on practice. Writing it, doing it!

Who is it for?
Your brand needs personality. You may have to be the face of your company. People want to see you 'in the flesh.' Short video clips are absorbing and are often preferred as a medium.


What you will learn
• How to make short clips that tell your story
• Content planning
• Purpose, impact, engagement and delivery
• Use of voice, diction, delivery, mannerisms, connection
• Tools, green screen, effects.

At the end of the day, you will have made clips to start your campaign and or to populate your website.



9. Presentation Skills

Being able to present well is career-changing. This course is unique. Not a load of old clichés, but a structured methodology, real techniques and an injection of great ideas that will change your whole approach! We work backwards - looking first at the result you need, then picking off each element of Presentations so that you prepare, deliver and get good at this enormously useful skill. We will rehearse, and you'll see huge improvements in your approach, structure, style and delivery. You'll be a changed person!


The Trainer
Paul Sampson was on the stage from 12 years old as a boy-singer in opera. He was taught stagecraft from some great mentors and still uses many of the same skills in the business world. With a degree in business and law, Paul combines corporate experience with helping smaller businesses, too. Then blends research with his own styles.

What you will learn
- Purpose - Setting the agenda
- The 'Why'
- Preparation - procedure
- The Room. Equipment
- Who's in the room?
- Materials sourcing and trump cards
- Creating the right first impressions
- Your personal preparation - 'plumage', voice, appearance
- Setting the stage, curtain raisers
- Tools - multi-media - PowerPoint, whiteboards, video, YouTube, live links.
- Meetings protocols
- Understanding and reading the room.
- Delivery styles, staying in control. Tone, diction, grammar, personal styles
- Audience psychology
- Presenting to 1, 5 or 500
- Pace, changing tempo, 'moving the room'
- Watching and working Body Language. Listening to silence.
- "Stack and Pack" - 'on-siding', building your story, building agreement
- Breakouts
- Handling challenges, objections and threats. Honouring questions
- 'Devil's Advocates'
- Going for the Close. Making it stick!
- Practice makes perfect.