Member Article

Liz Wright of Campbell Wright Ltd

With over 30 years of working in the corporate world in financial accountant roles, I have teamed up with Ali Campbell to create the Business Trainers Performance Method (BTPM). We have identified an elite niche market with pressing need for the BTPM, (which we continue to develop) and we are supremely confident that our creation can make a difference. My specific areas of expertise are: marketing, financial and IT.

What key challenges has your company recently faced?

We are a start-up company and so our main challenge has been marketing: how to get our brand out there and how to engage the attention of our target clientele. We are half-way there in that we know where to find the majority of our audience. Fortunately, with the internet, there is a wealth of information, advice and ideas freely available for companies just like us and with the use of social media we are able to reach a far greater and global audience.

What is your biggest achievement over the past 12 months?

I think our main achievement has been the creation of our BTPM Programme itself in response to the needs we have identified in the training sector. We mapped out a very clear gap in training for trainers by scoping and networking sites such as LinkedIn. This enabled us to assess the things trainers say they need, match those needs and come up with a rather spectacular answer. A very clear pattern emerged: our Eureka moment being when we discerned a clear connect between what is missing in conventional training and the potential for our Toolbox of participatory techniques to build bridges across it: between both ourselves and the trainer and between the trainer and those they train.

What is your biggest focus for the coming year?

Our focus is on developing our product range in an appropriate and sustainable way the task isnt just to sell: its to develop a client base with whom we maintain close contact and to foster a dialogue with them, enabling us to customise the Business Trainers Performance Method with increasing accuracy and appropriateness to the individual clients training requirements.This dialogue and the bespoke service it underpins is the essence of our brand and our niche clientele inform our decisions throughout the marketing process.

If you had to choose one top piece of advice for someone just starting out in business, or is currently operating within your industry sector, what would it be?

The training community we are increasingly in touch with through a range of social networks is a surprisingly generous one. Trainers naturally want to share skills, yet their working reality is often isolated, with the pressure to deliver squeezing out the impulse to share and experiment as a group who have affinity with one another. The exercises we use come from many sources (many were shared with us freely) and it is a natural impulse to share them in turn. Rather than seeing our task as a new business as one of sitting on a secret formula, we are following a more creative and abundant path: sharing tips, expertise and solutions with other trainers and trusting that goodwill and effective networking can accomplish what an ungenerous attitude and mode of operation never can.

Can you share with us your view of the current landscape of business, in this region or generally and where your organisation sits within it?

Current business training practice all too often appears to be wasteful in terms of time, human potential and demonstrates a huge under-use and/or misuse of good participatory practice. We believe that an imaginative and client-led approach backed up with some joined-up thinking will address these challenges. We are embracing the risks this approach involves with a trust that in these uncertain times the discerning trainer will be prepared to invest in a Method that builds on the skills they already have; speaks to the potential of those they work with and brings the energy more usually associated with the creative industries to the challenge of training in more conventional settings.

All human beings respond spontaneously and often with unlooked-for enthusiasm to being treated as creative, problem-solving collaborators rather than the passive recipients of one way, utilitarian training. There is no sector of the contemporary business landscape that might not benefit from a paradigm shift in training towards a Method with participation, empowerment and creativity at its heart. And we are unafraid to use the word HEART.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Liz Wright .