“I’ve now built 3 profitable businesses; one achieving £3.9million turnover within 18 months of launch. “

Meeting An ActionCOACH

“When we started Clerksroom, we had a 10-year plan which included two long-term goals – buy a building for our chambers and create a great working environment. However, Clerksroom grew rapidly and only two and a half years into the plan, we moved into our new building. It was then that growth began to plateau. “I met my Action Coach at a Somerset Chamber of Commerce seminar in September 2015. His first words to me were, ‘ActionCOACH can take a good business and help make it great’. I told him how I was exhausted running the business, working all hours of the day and night, reacting to what the business threw at me.

First Improvements

“I decided to attend the ActionCOACH PlanningCLUB which is a two-day business modelling programme. It’s a comprehensive overview of your business looking at vision, mission, unique selling points, finance, building effective teams and much more. It allowed me to compartmentalise the business into modules and challenges I could streamline to take the business forward. I found five particular areas I struggled with and so my coach had tailored our one-to-one coaching to those areas. Your coach doesn’t tell you how to run the business, they identifies where you have a gap and he helps you plug that gap.”

Ongoing Coaching

“We wanted to grow the business by 300% over the next 5 years. That wasn’t just a financial goal, we wanted greater stability and the ability to invest in our people and culture. We went from planning to borrow £30,000 to enable growth to identifying £130,000 of savings in the budget. December was historically a difficult month to obtain invoice payments but, with the help of ActionCOACH, December 2015 was one of our record months in terms of cashflow. We went from not having a handle on our KPIs to building bespoke Test & Measure Software that gives us real time conversion rates, lead source, geography of sale per transaction so we can work out an accurate return on investment.

“One of my goals was to free up time – not just for myself but for the whole team. We achieved this by automating regular tasks. One task we would complete 1,500 times a month with 157 actions taking a total of 20 minutes. By automating this one task, we could save 200 hours of staff time. You can imagine how this type of automation made our team nervous about cutting our staff numbers. ActionCOACH also educated me on leadership so I knew I had a communication need with my team. This automation meant we could increase our volume of work without having to take on extra staff and, far from making people redundant, they were given extra benefits because of our increased profitability.

The Results Continue

“ActionCOACH has taught us about testing, measuring, systemisation and documentation of processes – all fundamental principles which we could take forward to develop this new business. In 2016, Clerksroom Direct launched and we broke even in the first 12 months.  “However, we realised the way we had anticipated the public would use our services wasn’t quite right so we bit the bullet and reinvested our 2017 income into the business to fine tune it. ActionCOACH says a true business is one that works without you and, by testing and refining how Clerksroom Direct operates, by the end of 2017, it began to work exactly as we had intended.

“The dramatic growth meant we achieved £3.9million turnover within 18 months of launch. We test and measure everything and our KPI dashboard shows us what’s going on in the business. Our conversion rate from first enquiry to completed credit card payment by a client is 70%. We expect our income to now grow by 100% year on year. “It’s a long-term investment for long-term benefits. You can’t tell someone how to run their business, but you can give them the tools to help them do that for themselves. ActionCOACH does this and my coach keeps redirecting me back to those tools and principles.”

“I was able to take a 2-month break to travel around New Zealand.”