I’m proud of the work I do, and of my wonderful clients.  Read on to learn more about some of what I’ve done with and for my clients and their organisations.

Kind words on international woman’s day

The best coach I could ever have hoped to work with, the best trainer we’ve ever used,  and someone who combines an amazing business brain with huge emotional intelligence. She’s taught me so much, and the whole of our business continues to benefit from her experience and her intelligence.

Gaining clarity on how to lead 

Coaching with Practice has helped me gain clarity on how I want to lead my team.  It’s led to me helping other people work better – our business has benefited as a result.  I’ve become more confident about how I add value.  I can let myself experiment and make valuable mistakes.  Coaching has enabled me to be my best self, and be more confident about my ambition, and of how I do myself, and my team, justice.

Creating clarity and focus

Alice has been a fantastic coach over the past two years as well as providing counsel to the wider GK leadership on strategy. Alice’s strength is in providing nurturing challenge and facilitating clarity and focused plans to take forward. Thank you for the support Alice.

Immediate payback on training

I wanted to send you a quick note about how much value I gained from the
consultative sales training. I haven’t completed any training before that’s made such a difference to how I work/behave so quickly.

In case it’s useful, here are the two things I’ve immediately changed:
– A proposal being a summary of an agreed approach. We paused the way we
were responding to a live XXX brief (a little risky but why wait…), did
it this way in person, and managed to float much bigger numbers than we
ever have done before. Obviously proof will be in the formal approval but
I’m quietly confident about this one and the approval/chemistry in the
meeting was brilliant.
– Letting the conversation flow more from that initial high value prompt,
ensuring everyone is heard equally, genuinely listening, playing back. I
had to run a scoping workshop with a large group by phone (!) yesterday
and I was worried about how well this would work when I wasn’t in the room
with people. It worked perfectly – everyone was heard and we stayed on
track with the timings. And we left with a MUCH bigger opportunity than we
started with.

Anyway I’m sure you know the power of all of this already – but I thought
it was worth sharing.

Sales training to a large PE firm

Alice has played a lead role in writing and delivering a finely tuned and highly productive 3-day selling course for the investors at BGF.  We’ve run this course several times and it has become a flagship course within our training programme.  Participants love it, learn a huge amount and are clear about how to take this learning back to their day jobs.  Alice’s understanding of our business, the unique frameworks she has developed, and her high impact management of role plays are all key to the success of the course. With her deep understanding of business, selling, people and teaching, Alice just knows, and does, this stuff really well.

Sales training to a different large PE firm

I have known Alice for over three years and we have worked together on several selling skills training courses over that time.  I have worked with her as a course delegate in 2 different firms, and have also helped her on the course-delivery side.  I have observed Alice influence significant positive change in the way her course delegates approach selling situations, and have directly experienced the quick-wins and longer-term success that Alice’s teaching delivers when put into practice.  Notably, she has developed clear, practical frameworks for structuring selling meetings that are easy to follow and impactful in practice.  Also, she instils in her students techniques and core skills that are easy to understand and highly effective in real situations.  As well as running her own business Alice is a former private equity investment professional and so has the credentials, war stories and a practical appreciation of commercial context across a broad range of selling situations.  Alice has a fantastic interpersonal style which she adapts skilfully to different levels of ability; she commands respect leading by example, is consummate in managing video case studies, and is great fun to work with.

Heralding a new era of fearless strengths-based leadership

It has been a pleasure working with you. Thank you so very much – it has had a demonstrable impact on my thinking and therefore my future. I am able to much better understand, utilise and therefore maximise my strengths and recognise that some perceived weaknesses are actually the attributes that ensure I am conscientious and always aspiring.

I have started a journey of continuous learning, improving, reflecting & achieving and will enjoy it so much more now rather than worrying about where the end point is. I will be recommending your professional coaching to all my friends!

Creating clear direction and teamwork

I’ve been using a coaching and consulting firm called Practice over the last few months. The focus that this has brought to the business has been terrific, and really useful for both myself and the management team – there’s a really good feeling of teamwork and clear direction in the business as a result.

Facilitating planning process for fast growing service business

We asked Practice to help our Management Board develop a five year plan.  Our consultant’s combination of business experience and mentoring skills meant she was a great fit for our business. Practice was quickly able to assimilate what we were trying to achieve, our culture and our goals, and help us structure our thinking in a coherent, clear and simple way.  This has allowed us to share the plan easily with the wider company. It has also helped us establish how we can deliver the plan and measure its success.  Practice has helped bring clarity and structure both to our five year plan and, more generally, to our understanding of the role of our Management Board. We’re looking forward to working with it in future.

Introducing best practice strategic assessment to an award winning venture capital firm

We wanted to improve the way we assess strategy and asked Practice to review the literature & current practice, and create a framework for our due diligence and ongoing portfolio management.  Practice rose to this challenge and delivered exactly what we wanted.  We now have an evidence-based, elegant, and actionable checklist to underpin this critical part of our business.  Brilliant!

Introducing best practice in assessing CEOs for an award winning venture capital firm

We engaged Practice to propose improvements to the way we assess and work with the CEOs of our fast growing portfolio companies.  Practice’s work was brilliant: perfectly focused, leading edge, inspiring and practical.  We use it daily in this key aspect of our business.

Shifting the culture

‘Selling’ (client development) has gone from being a dirty word at cxpartners, to not just something which everyone sees as part of their job, but also to something for which there is enthusiasm and interest. We now have a common vocabulary and shared framework for how we talk to our clients about our work and its value. In a number of specific instances, Alice’s training has enabled cx staff to come up with new approaches to clients and to unblock opportunities – something which has tangible commercial value for cxpartners. The training has also helped us to clarify what skills we are looking for in our new hires, and helped us to refine some of our interview processes.

Learning to sell

I was lucky enough to take part in one of Alice’s Consultative Selling courses. I found the course immediately helpful in several ways. It helped me reflect on what ‘selling’ is and become much happier with selling as an activity. It helped me sell work for my employer straight away the week I did the course. And, at a personal level, it has helped me, as a UX Research contractor, network and understand contracting opportunities much better. The course has opened doors to opportunities in the UK and New Zealand.

Transforming 

Coaching has transformed my life at work. I’d had a rough year after being promoted to manage a team of people and I was struggling, but the sessions helped me clearly see what was going wrong and what I needed to do to improve things. Both me and my team have seen immediate benefits and we’re all much happier and definitely way more productive than we were. The strangest and most powerful thing about the coaching was that all the answers seemed to come from inside myself, which I wasn’t expecting.

Something has to change

When I started coaching I was feeling swamped in an ill-defined role. My time with my coach helped me see that something had to change and I was then able to kick start the change process. I’m so glad I made it happen. I am much happier, and much better value for my employers now I’m in a role I’m more suited to.  Thank you.

Integrating reflective practice, academic learning and work experience

Cardiff Business School recently led the UK by introducing an innovative degree programme which integrates work experience and academic development.  Practice brought this integration to life by designing and delivering a module which linked academic theories of learning and reflection to day to day management practice.  The quality of Practice’s work has been of the first order: the students loved it and feedback from employers has been extremely positive.  We confidently expect this programme, and Practice’s part in it, to grow.

Creating new opportunities for a household name charity

Working with Practice has created new opportunities for our Education and Learning service. Practice has understood our skills and values, translated them into specific interpersonal skills-based training programmes and delivered these to Social Care professionals across Bristol, all with very little fuss and to great acclaim from our customers. Highly recommended!

Delivering training to Social Care Professionals

PEYTU has been working in partnership with Practice for a number of years in the delivery of training across the children and young people’s workforce in Bristol. We consistently receive an excellent level of service both in terms of the quality of training delivered, as well as the responsive and effective management of courses. We are passionate about supporting professionals in their work with children and young people, and we can always be confident that this passion and commitment to high quality training is shared by Practice, to the ultimate benefit of our service users.