Working in Toronto

Three days working with 10 coaches at The Grand Hotel and the first day flew by. We began by creating a mind map to answer the question “where do you want to be by 5.00pm on Saturday?”. The I updated the group on my own business progress since we last met. In the afternoon we began the process of deconstructing each individual coaches business and determining “what has to happen next?” The themes emerging from the day were:

1. The desire to do the type of coaching we love to do with the people we love to coach;

2. The importance of delegating ALL of the work to a support team;

3. The value of robust marketing systems and

4. The necessity to create a sales-driven business.

We also evolved a facinating conversation on the distinction between: Marketing – a robust business system and Branding – what happens when clients seek you out to confirm their own identity and end their isolation. That’s a very unusual distinction and I’m working on a matrix as we speak! After our formal meeting I enjoyed catching up with Michael Bungay Stanier for drinks – he is one of the most inspirational guys I know and my biggest ever candidate for “the next Thomas Leonard”. You can delight in his work at http://www.boxofcrayons.biz/index.php. We were also joined for dinner at Il Fornello on the Waterfront by Rosemary Davies-Janes of http://www.miboso.com/. Rosemary helped me to create the personal branding statement that you can read via one of the links on the right hand side of this blog page.