Choosing a leadership programme is a bigger decision for an SME owner than it first appears. You’re committing money, but you’re also committing months of your own time and your senior team’s, in a business where nobody is standing by to pick up the slack. …
Ever come back from a leadership course full of ideas, only for the day job to take over by Monday? You’re not the only one. We looked at why leadership training doesn’t stick in small businesses and what helps it last. We also explain how coaching, peer groups and shadowing help leaders put what they learn to work.…
What difference does leadership development make to an SME? Our 2026 Impact Survey of delegates, backed by 15 years of research, shows LEAD™ building confident leaders and clearer plans, GOLD™ embedding board-level governance and the full LEAD™, GOLD™ and GAIN™ programme widening leaders' focus to their people and community.…
We asked our own CEO, Dr Stewart Barnes, to write a long-read piece on Strategic Planning for Small-Medium Businesses (SMBs), sharing the steps and framework needed for…
Giving feedback is one of the hardest parts of leading a business. In research published by Harvard Business Review, 44% of those surveyed said giving negative feedback was stressful or difficult and 21% admitted they avoid it altogether. Emotional intelligence decides whether the conversation works or falls apart.…
The paperback of Developing Financial Leadership in Small-Medium Businesses has been out a month, and we are halfway through the Know Your Numbers series. One theme keeps coming back: the financial information exists in most SMBs, but often only one person understands what it means for the next decision.…
Wellbeing is regularly in the news, but what can leaders of small-medium businesses actually do about it? Eight key factors to work with, why pressure is so badly misunderstood and what poor wellbeing looks like inside a business. Plus the argument that most wellbeing initiatives fail for reasons that have nothing to do with wellbeing itself and everything to do with leading change.…
Two businesses can turn over the same money in the same year and be worth entirely different amounts, and the reason usually has very little to do with the year in question. Business value is a measure of what a company will be able to produce in the years ahead, which means it is built out of three things: customers who keep buying and will accept a fair price; capability that sits in the organisation and not in a…