December 1, 2023

What is your area of expertise or focus and who do you help?  

Storytelling and communication skills. I work with people in the tech industry who are primarily a part of rapidly scaling organizations. Usually as small as 200 people up to about 10,000.

So, the reason I’ve chosen that is because communication only really becomes a challenge when you get up to about 200 people. This is because of a theory in anthropology or sociology called Dunbar’s number. It states that we have evolved to be in a community of a maximum number of people. That number is 148. Most tribes and so on will not go bigger than that. But of course, businesses and cities go significantly bigger than that. And up until that point, you can get by with gossip and just muddle along but beyond that, you need to have some more rigid structures in place. That’s when corporate politics and things begin to happen, and communication becomes a bit hard, and the best ideas don’t always shine through. I want to help companies do that. Find what their story is, where they are going next, and what is the right thing to do. If someone has an idea, can they argue their case? If they were salespeople too and they were in a crowded marketplace, can they show why their product is able to perform where other people’s cannot? 

I’m British. But, I’ve lived in Germany, and Germany has a significant tech sector. That’s maybe one of the reasons I went into tech so hard, is because that’s what’s here. I do have a passion for technology too. I love how technology relates to music, and when it relates to society. I find that people in tech have some exciting stuff, but they don’t always get recognition until someone tells a compelling story about it. The internet was invented in the 60s and yet, no one really knew what to do with it until the 90s. So, it’s always something in tech work. In terms of the academics, they’re the ones driving things forward. But without the storytellers, it doesn’t really enter the public consciousness.

When I work with people, there’s a mixture of things that happen. It’s basically set up in three tiers. There are teams, team training, and one-on-one coaching or keynotes. So team training is usually short online workshops for like 20 people, not really much more. We’re delivering a framework in a couple of hours and departments will commission me because they want to offer it to their team members and so on. Sometimes, they’ll do a team off-site or a team development thing, which is really cool. Sometimes there are programs. That doesn’t happen so often because people don’t usually dedicate a whole project to learning, they just kind of want one thing and then that’s it. It’s a shame because it limits the progress you can make. But sometimes you get leaders who get it. We’ve got people preparing for keynotes. So a company will send one of their execs to speak at loads of conferences and they pay loads of money to get them on stage in these conferences. It’s a massive waste of money if they don’t get that person to perform well and do what they want them to do. So, it’s important to help them develop that. Then, there’s ongoing leadership training. Sometimes someone is promoted to director level, and a big part of their job is restructuring a team for a particular product. You probably saw it in events all the time. It’s more important about like, how do I structure this? How do I scale my communication to talk to lots of people? I help with that and I will usually be on for a period of about three months. What I prefer most is the workshops, and then keynotes which I treat as a massive workshop with a lot more people and of course less interactive. 

Tell us a little bit about yourself. 

My career and my interest in communication began before I was a trainer. I don’t have the typical background that most trainers have. I didn’t have a corporate job and then went into training, and I didn’t work for a training company and then went to training. I was a tour guide in Berlin, so I was giving what are called Free Tours.

The tour doesn’t cost anything, you just turn up. Then, at the end, if they’re good, you basically give them a tip. But, what you don’t know is that the guide pays a marketing fee. So I paid three Euros per person in the group. 30 people cost me 90 euros. But the idea was that I keep the difference between what they give me and what I pay. And you might think Oh brilliant, that’s fine, because then everyone pays 15 euros for a tour normally. That’s not how it works. If people don’t have to pay for something then a lot of people don’t pay for it. And there are also cultural nuances to tipping. If it was only Americans, It would have been brilliant because America is a tipping culture. But, someone from a country that doesn’t have tipping like any of the Nordic countries for instance, then they just don’t think to do it. I found that at the beginning, I wasn’t really doing very well. And I wasn’t even really able to earn enough to live, so I had to work out how I could engage people, and the metric I was tracking all the time was the amount of money I was making. So I looked at how much money I was getting per person and I tried to improve that every single time. I tried all sorts of different things like learning as much as possible about the facts and overloading people with information which just didn’t work. I tried developing picture books and a kind of multimedia and that didn’t really work. I tried subliminal messaging and I thought “Oh yeah, maybe if you say this.” But in the end, I realized that storytelling is the most powerful way to get complex information over to people.

So, I started creating frameworks and using metrics to track how much I was making per person and how that was developing. I gave around 3,000 talks as a tour guide, so I had a lot of data to work with. And then I started developing and delivering those in tech companies. I was just getting into this in 2019. And I thought okay, I’ll just do a few workshops but then COVID hit and there was no more guiding and I was a freelancer so I had no money. I had to make it work. And I was lucky because all of the agencies and established trainers said, “Oh, we’ll wait for things to return to normal.” Or they just delivered exactly the same thing as they’d done in person but online. I didn’t really have a track record, so I pivoted hard to online training and tried to get as good at it as quickly as possible. It wasn’t easy. 

What do you find to be the most rewarding thing about being a coach?

When people are able to actually do something with it. It’s all nice when you say “Oh, I felt really empowered” and stuff. I like that. But, when people are able to get a better role or get something as a result, that’s when you feel that it’s not just because you can game making people feel better about themselves, and loads and loads of coaches do it. They’ll have lots of exercises to make people feel positive at the end. There’s nothing wrong with that because the motivation is useful. But, it’s most rewarding when you’ve realized that you’re not just doing this to make people feel better about themselves. It actually does help. They were able to get investment, their success is real and I played some part in that. So it’s the real tangible results, which usually means some sort of financial or data output to get out of it. Making an impact.

What is the most challenging thing about being a coach? 

Well, it’s actually going to become more of a challenge in that, learning in companies is not always valued. As an investment, it is seen as, “Oh, we give this to people so they feel valued as our team members, and we reduce churn by creating these learning experiences” and they know that’s all true and it does help them make money but, it’s frustrating when I’m giving them stuff which their team can then use to generate real results and they’re not seeing it in that way. It’s just a cost to them. And when it’s just a cost, the default will always be how can we make it cheaper and shorter? And then now AI is happening. There are companies in Berlin, whose sales training listens to all of your sales calls and AI works out what you’re doing wrong. It gives you focused bits of content and exercises you can try and then listens to your other sales calls and keeps helping you refine over time. It’s kind of gamifying the whole thing. I can’t do that as a person and so, that’s what I find a bit of a drag – not really being valued as an investment but being a cost. I think professional learning will change quite a bit because of that, and what we’re offering is going to change in the future.

It’s kind of terrifying because I see the end of my career as I know it but equally, all of these disruptions, if you tackle them head-on, you’re able to create something better than there was before. This is a push, like, I’ve got to solve this in the next year. So I do need to work out okay, what is an investment to people in the same skills, same stuff, but it just might not be shown as learning. 

What are some of your top tips for starting, running, and growing a coaching business?

Focus heavily on your audience. What I did when I started, was, I thought, Okay, I want to be a public speaking coach. I teach public speaking and it’s all about public speaking, and you’re going to become a great public speaker. So it’s all about, these are the things that I deliver to you. And there was no real consideration as to what the challenges of my audience were. And if you’d asked me, “What is the challenge of the audience?” I would have said, “Oh, they don’t like to give speeches” but, that’s not how most people consider it. When you think like that, the only people you’re going to attract are people who are already interested in what you deliver. I worked with Murray Cowell, he’s been working in corporate training for 25 years. And he asked me these difficult questions, trying to understand my clients, and then I just started thinking about the realities of that person’s life. And when I could create things that helped them, there were some more opportunities that opened up because once you understand what the problem is, then everything else solves itself. It’s all about what is my client’s problem and more specifically, how they perceive their problem. They might not even perceive the problem that you’re solving yet. Then, you know where to start off with your marketing.

Where can people find you and your business? 

You can find more about me and my business on my website and you can connect with me on Linkedin, Instagram, and TikTok.