Are you still in love with your business? As businesses grow they often scale commercially but not culturally. That can leave the commercial side of the equation working well enough, but the cultural side lagging behind resulting in energy blocks, resistances and tensions that can get in the way of growth. This interactive workshop shows you how to balance the commercial and cultural sides of your business, stay in love with your business and enjoy the journey more.

Key takeaways:

• Explore what staying in love with your business looks and feels like.

• Understand where you are up to and how you benchmark the cultural side of your business.

• Learn what to do differently to create a more enjoyable business.

Money is not everything in business, but it helps! Do you want to be more profitable, or are you just focusing on achieving a margin? Do you know the profit potential of your business? Are you achieving the optimal effort/reward ratio? This interactive workshop shows you how to be even more profitable than you already are, and it might not be how you think.

Key takeaways:

• Explore what real profitability is all about.

• Understand where you are up to and how you benchmark your profitability.

• Learn what to do differently to become even more profitable.

How many business people are actively managing the value of their business? Not many. Yet the eventual exit value business owners achieve is usually key in terms of their long-term financial security. While you may still be some years away from exit, it’s never too early to start thinking about creating additional value, but it can be too late! This interactive workshop shows you how value creation actually works so you can apply it in your business.

Key takeaways:

• Explore what drives value in businesses.

• Understand where you are up to and how you benchmark your value.

• Learn what to do differently to become even more valuable.

Enabling resilience

Resilience is the courage to not give up and the ability to bounce back from failure.

Much focus has been placed on personal resilience

As a result, it has become a selfish subject. Whilst personal resilience is something to be encouraged, being resilient on your own is not the answer. Enabling resilience in each other is crucial to dealing with change and high-pressure environments.

• The most successful leaders and teams are the ones that understand how to enable resilience in each other

• They understand how and when to provide reassurance and direction

• They understand when to lead and when to manage

During this session participants will learn how to enable resilience in each other, themselves and their teams.

The common perception of intelligence officers, in the movies, is lone, maverick operators taking on the world singlehandedly. This could not be further from the truth. In reality the real skill of an intelligence officer is enable resilience in their agents and empower them to achieve beyond their comfort zones often in challenging and dangerous situations.

As a former intelligence officer Timothy was required to enable resilience in a cross section of cultures and generations. Often confronting generational perception and stereotypes.

This workshop will draw on his experiences and provide participants with a toolkit that can be applied in the modern working environment.

Key Takeaways:

• Learn how to enable resilience in each other and the importance of collective resilience.

• Understand when to lead and when to manage to help teams grow resilient.

• Develop practical skills to apply resilience strategies in high-pressure situations.

• Gain insights into overcoming challenges and empowering others to step beyond their comfort zones.

Lots of companies talk about team work yet reward performance on an individual basis. This “say-do gap” is ultimately getting in the way of better business.

We will work indoors and outdoors exploring how an approach based on Situations, Foundations, Aspirations, and Operations can offer a consistent way of elevating and evaluating collective performance.

We will tap into your lived experience, share stories from special forces, and get your brains buzzing and hearts beating by sampling score orienteering as an experiential metaphor for effective team work.

Key takeaways:

• Effective teams are not an accident.
• Building and developing effective teams is a business critical leadership skill.
• It is a skill that you must model and enable in others.
• You will leave the session with a team-effectiveness assessment tool and development blueprint.

Attracting, hiring and keeping the right people for your business shouldn’t be a lottery, yet most entrepreneurs struggle with hiring at some time or other. Good people don’t seem to stay or – possibly worse – people who were great at interview turn out to be useless at the job, costing you time, money and stress.

Sometimes it is down to ‘access to talent’, and sometimes (there’s no easy way to say this) it’s a ‘you problem’ around recruitment and retention.

The good news is… that’s something you can fix.

DO NOT just ‘wing it’ or go with your gut and hope for the best. Follow this proven approach, and give yourself the best chance of getting the right person in the right role first time… and keeping them.

Key Takeaways:

• Linking your hiring approach to your strategy: hiring someone can sometimes be a knee-jerk reaction to current demands. Taking a strategic approach, though, is going to be better for your business in the long run
• Gaining clarity about what you actually want: thorough thinking about what you want and what your business needs is vital before you even start to look for that new hire. Simply ‘getting the right person on the bus’ and training them isn’t always the wisest approach
• The 3 key phases of interviewing: there’s preparation to be done if your interview is going to genuinely sort the good from the bad and the ugly. Here, we’ll look at recognised best practice on choosing a selection process and interviewing, how to frame your questions and what NOT to say or ask.
• How to onboard people into your team: this crucial stage is often overlooked, and yet it’s the one here you ensure that your new hire gets off to the best possible start. It’s also where you springboard into your performance management protocols, ensuring that everyone is clear on business goals and what they need to deliver in order to meet them. You do have those…. don’t you?!

Leading Change

Thrive in a VUCA environment. Humans prefer routines and consistency. They provide stability and a sense of well-being. When we remove conventional parameters stress and anxiety are induced.

Humans prefer routines and consistency.

Every generation believes that theirs is the most challenging. A brief study of history shows that there is rarely, if ever, a stable period in time. The only consistency is change. If we seek out new market opportunities or growth by definition we seek change. The intelligence community refers to this state as VUCA – Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. It is challenging and uncomfortable but also where the opportunity lies. 

They provide stability and a sense of well-being. When we remove conventional parameters stress and anxiety are induced.

Change has profound physiological and psychological effects on the human body. 

Some of the effects of change are hormone driven, chemical reactions triggered by our fight or flight mechanism, some are psychological effects driven by anxiety and insecurity.

In order to succeed in a VUCA environment, leaders and teams need to become comfortable with being uncomfortable. They must develop an understanding of the effects of change on the human body. Then learn when to manage and when to lead.

“Provide reassurance and direction”

This workshop will provide participants with the code unlocking effective change. It will provide a toolkit that leaders can share with their teams in order to help them thrive in a VUCA environment and gain an advantage over their competition.

As a former intelligence officer Timothy was tested and trained utilising a highly stressful and unforgiving programme.

He was taught to see a changing environment as an opportunity to gather intelligence and seek opportunity. The skills and techniques he has developed across a wide spectrum of stakeholders form the basis of this highly effective workshop.

Key Takeaways:

• Learn to thrive in a VUCA environment by managing the effects of change on the body and mind.

• Understand when to manage and when to lead during periods of uncertainty.

• Develop skills to turn a changing environment into an opportunity.

• Gain a toolkit to help your team navigate challenges in volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous settings.

• Transform the discomfort of change into a competitive advantage for your team and business.

Overview
We've all heard that AI is reshaping how we operate, lead, and compete, but what does that really mean for our businesses today? This session brings clarity to the conversation, helping leaders cut through the hype and understand where AI can truly create value. Expect practical insights, grounded frameworks, and the confidence to lead with purpose in an intelligence-driven world.

Key Takeaways

• A clear, jargon-free understanding of what AI is — and what it isn’t

• Introduction to Owendale’s Automate / Enhance / Experience framework to pinpoint where AI adds value

• Insight into AI’s impact on strategy, operations, workforce, and customer experience

• Real-world case studies and relatable examples that bring concepts to life

• Increased confidence to lead internal conversations and strategic decisions around AI

Your people have a clear understanding of delegations and escalations (do they?!), which means the toughest of calls are reserved for you and the top team.

So, how do you do tackle these big decisions when the options are dire? No good outcome, just a least bad one?

We will tap into your lived experience, explore a number of ethically challenging scenarios, and consider a number of decision-making frameworks drawn from high risk contexts such as the emergency services, nuclear power generation, and the military. We will explore all of this on a reflective group walk, a great decision-making strategy in itself.

Key takeaways:

• You will re-think how you make individual and collective decisions.
• You will reflect on the biases that may be causing conflict in your top team and with other stakeholders
• You will explore the differences between intuition, opinion, assumption, and “fact”, and how your preferences are influencing your decisions.
• You will leave with a number of decision-making frameworks to experiment with back in the workplace, with the consequent opportunity of spreading and embedding what works best across your business.

The model that got you to here is unlikely to be the same model that will get you to there! Your business model is how you go about making money and it’s a bit like a recipe. Do you have the recipe for success? The recipe for success requires all of the ingredients, of the right quality, in the right quantity, and mixed in the right order if you are to realise your full potential. This interactive workshop shows you how be an even better chef in your business kitchen and model your business to achieve greater success.

Key takeaways:

• Explore how business modelling and the recipe for success works.

• Understand the various ingredients that are required.

• Learn how to mix them in the right way and right order for greater success.

Being able to present yourself in a positive way is not only useful in a business context, but in any part of your walk of life. In this workshop, we take a look into mastering your own voice and body language to create an impression of confidence, inspiration, and influence in your position as a leader in situations where it really matters, leveraging practical techniques derived from the theatre and applying them to business situations.

In addition, we’ll look at how to ‘read the room’ - understanding non verbal micro-signals language and recognising what’s NOT being said, what to do about it.

Key Takeaways:

• The impression you want to create: our starting point is thinking deeply about the impression you want to give, and what you currently do or don’t do to convey this. Why? Because everything starts with what’s going on in our heads…
• Mindset before behaviours: we’ll cover some core ‘thinking techniques’ to uncover subconscious factors that might be holding you back, and how to overcome them
• Using your voice for impact: we’ll branch into practical breathing and voice techniques that you can deploy at will to deliver a powerful, confident message
• Influential body language: non-verbal signals will often give us away. Learn exactly how to position and carry yourself to add weight and gravitas to your message, not accidentally undermine it
• Reading the room: being able to manage your own body language is one thing – reading the room is another. We’ll look at microsignals well beyond the obvious ‘folder arms’ analysis, giving you the edge when it comes to working out what people aren’t saying, but what you need t know
• ‘In the moment’ strategies for more pressured situations: we’ll focus on practical techniques to hold your nerve and preserve an air of confidence in the face of challenge, and in high pressured situations

Why did you start your business? Where are you up to? As businesses grow it’s important to try and stay one step ahead of the business, of your industry and of the economic cycle. This allows you not just to do the right things, but to do the right things at the right time – and sometimes it’s counter-intuitive. This interactive workshop explores the entrepreneur’s journey from start-up to the optimal timing for eventual exit, the issues that show up at different stages, and how to deal with them without getting stuck.

Key takeaways:

• Explore the entrepreneur’s journey and see it in a new light.

• Understand the key issues at each stage and how to deal with them.

• Learn how to jump over “elephant traps” and get to where you to get to faster.