Every business receives complaints from customers from time to time. Even the most slick operation with the best product in the world will make mistakes or have mishaps which mean unhappy customers complain about the product or service they have received. Clearly every company strives to drive a perfect order process but sometime the most […]

Pareto power for the enterprise race and the vital importance of knowing your finances There is a massive line between attention to detail and perfectionism. There is also an unbelievable amount of challenge when it comes to building any enterprise or any kind and making it successful and the much higher chance of that company […]

What makes a great mentor? What do you need to get right? I gave my thoughts to Natwest, as they spoke to experts and SME owners, who are mentors to other businesses, to find out why we do it and what we get out of it. Read the full article here.

By now I’m sure we’ve all heard of the famous book by Carol Dweck about the idea of having a growth mindset. They teach this sort of thing in schools these days – but many of us in business left school long before the book was published in 2006, and I think it’s crucial in […]

Many people seem to think that since selling my majority share in Pacific Direct my life would be stress free. I may well no longer be in control of a large multinational company with hundreds of employees on several continents – but I do have three teenage daughters, a husband, two dogs, a home to […]

I am often asked if I mentor in business. Often after speeches, by Linked In, requests from friends, indeed even in chance meetings and then sometimes when stalked. (In a nice way.) I’m afraid these days my answer is most often an immediate no. As a general rule, I don’t have a lot of free […]

When people talk about employee wellbeing, it’s easy as a business owner to gulp and think about how much all this fluffiness is going to cost your business. When you’re running a small business, every bill makes a difference and we often see things like employee wellbeing as something that will eat away at that […]

Love your hippocampus. A recent conference really got me thinking harder about the vital importance of managing time and priorities for the benefit of my health – my engine, the brain and the body are the only 2 engines I can really control myself. I have worked hard to bother looking after my wellbeing, throughout […]

Have you heard of positive psychology? It’s a relatively new area of study, begun by Martin Seligman in 1998. Until this point, traditional psychology focused on fixing problems; it would study things like mental illnesses and negative thinking and look at ways of resolving them. Positive psychology instead focuses more on the idea of having […]

There has been a lot in the media recently about wellbeing in the workplace. Everyone seems to be talking about it. Is workplace wellbeing really all that important? In a word, yes. Indeed given the simple calculation of time we spend in life surely the waking hours being just as important as the sleeping hours, […]