Business Leadership Coaching & Mentoring Programme
Better thinking. Better leadership. Better decisions.
A six-month, one-to-one development programme for managers and leaders who want the space to think, be challenged and develop their capability — while dealing with the realities of actually running a business, function, department, team or operation.
6 × 75-minute individual sessions over six months
£1,500 (pay upfront or by instalments)
Better thinking. Better leadership. Better decisions.
A six-month, one-to-one development programme for business leaders who want the space to think, be challenged and develop their capability — while dealing with the realities of actually running a business, store, region or function.
6 months
Time to apply and learn
6 sessions
Structured monthly conversations
75 minutes
Enough time to get beneath the surface
1:1
Entirely focused on you
Leadership development, grounded in the real world
There is always another target, another people issue, another meeting, another customer or stakeholder challenge and another priority competing for attention.
Yet the further your career progresses, the more important the quality of your thinking becomes.
The Business Leadership Coaching & Mentoring Programme creates protected time away from the noise of day-to-day management to consider what is happening, why it is happening, what you can influence and what you are going to do next.
It isn't a prescribed training course or six months of management theory.
It is a confidential, practical development relationship focused on you, your leadership and the real situations you are managing.
Who is the programme for?
The programme is designed for managers and leaders responsible for people, performance, customers, operations or business results.
You might be:
Stepping into your first significant management position.
An experienced manager preparing for your next career move.
Moving from managing one team, location or department to taking on broader responsibility.
Leading through other managers and wanting to increase your impact through them.
A Head of Department or Function navigating more complex organisational challenges.
A senior leader wanting an independent person with whom to pressure-test decisions.
Running or helping to grow an SME or developing business.
Leading through significant organisational, commercial or personal change.
Performing well but conscious that what got you here may not be enough to get you where you want to go next.
You don't need to have a problem that needs fixing.
Some of the most valuable development happens when things are going well and you have the capacity and ambition to become better.
Coaching + Mentoring
There is a deliberate reason the programme includes both.
Coaching when the answer needs to come from you.
Good coaching shouldn't create dependence on a coach.
Through questioning, reflection and challenge, I will help you examine situations from different perspectives, understand your assumptions, establish what you really think and decide what you want to do next.
Mentoring when relevant experience can help you find the route faster.
Sometimes you don't need another question.
You need to talk to someone who understands the realities of managing people, delivering performance, making commercial decisions and navigating organisations.
Where my own experience is relevant, I will share it.
Not because my answer automatically becomes your answer, but because another perspective, example, model or experience can give you something useful to test against your own situation.
The balance will change from conversation to conversation.
Sometimes I will coach.
Sometimes I will mentor.
Sometimes I will challenge.
My role isn't to make your decisions for you. It is to help you become increasingly confident and capable of making them yourself.
What could we work on?
There is deliberately no fixed syllabus.
Your objectives establish the direction of the programme and the issues you are managing determine where individual conversations need to go.
Typical areas could include:
And occasionally the most useful conversations will simply start:
“This is what I’m dealing with. What am I missing?”
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Developing your own leadership approach, understanding when to lead and when to manage, delegation, accountability and increasing your impact through other people.
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Setting expectations, difficult conversations, performance management, engagement, motivation, succession and developing stronger teams.
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Connecting operational activity to commercial outcomes, understanding the inputs behind results and making better decisions about where to focus your attention.
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Communicating with greater clarity, adapting your approach, stakeholder management, influencing upwards and managing challenging relationships.
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Managing competing demands, understanding what really matters, making deliberate choices about your time and avoiding activity becoming a substitute for progress.
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Preparing for greater responsibility, understanding development gaps, navigating a new position or thinking more deliberately about your longer-term career.
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Developing clearer goals, understanding where you or your business are trying to get to, considering options and turning ambition into practical action.
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Leading through uncertainty, organisational change, difficult situations or periods when the obvious answer isn't necessarily the right one.
How the programme works
Before we start
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We start with a no-obligation conversation.
It gives us both an opportunity to understand what you are looking for, discuss how I work and decide whether we are likely to work effectively together.
Coaching and mentoring depend on trust. There should be no pressure to proceed unless the fit feels right on both sides.
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Before our first full session, I will ask you to reflect on where you are now, what you want from the programme and the areas in which you most want to develop.
This gives us a useful baseline without pretending that everything can be reduced to a score.
The six months
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We establish where you are, what is happening around you and what you want to achieve.
Together we agree the priorities for the programme and what meaningful progress would look like.
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This is where the programme becomes deliberately flexible.
We use the situations you are actually facing to explore behaviours, decisions, relationships, performance and opportunities.
Where useful, I will introduce models, concepts, tools or examples.
But the important bit happens outside the session.
You apply what is useful in the real world, see what happens and bring that learning back into our next conversation.
We keep what works.
We question what doesn't.
And we adjust.
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Our final formal session looks back before looking forward.
What has changed?
What have you learnt?
What are you doing differently?
What still needs work?
And, importantly, how will you continue your development without needing a coach sitting beside you?
We finish with a practical 90-day development plan for what comes next.
What is included?
Six private 75-minute coaching and mentoring sessions - Approximately one session each month over six months.
Initial development questionnaire and objective setting - Giving us a clear starting point and agreed direction.
Relevant tools and resources - Where useful, I will share models, frameworks, exercises or resources that support the issues we are discussing.
Actions and reflections - Sessions finish with clarity around what you intend to do, explore or think about before we next speak.
Between-session support - One brief email exchange or 15-minute check-in between scheduled sessions when you need to pressure-test something relating to the programme.
Final development review - Reflecting on the progress made across the six months.
90-day development plan - A practical plan to maintain momentum beyond the programme.
Why Fundamental Management?My approach to leadership development comes from management itself.
I have spent more than two decades managing people, operations and businesses, including large-scale, multi-site and customer-facing organisations.
That experience has reinforced something I believe strongly:
Leadership doesn't operate in isolation from the business.
People.
Customers.
Performance.
Resource.
Operations.
Culture.
Commercial outcomes.
They aren't separate subjects.
Good managers learn to understand how they connect.
That means our conversations can move naturally between leadership behaviour and the business reality surrounding it.
My approach is grounded in a fairly simple principle:
Understand the reality. Identify the cause. Create clarity. Act deliberately. Measure what changes.
There are plenty of leadership theories, models and frameworks that can help us along the way.
But there isn't a silver bullet.
Sustainable improvement normally comes from understanding yourself, understanding the situation and becoming increasingly good at the fundamentals.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Both.
Coaching helps you develop your own thinking, judgement and solutions. Mentoring allows me to share relevant experience, perspectives and advice where doing so would genuinely help.
The balance depends on you and the subject we are discussing.
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No.
Much of my own management experience has been gained within retail and complex customer-facing businesses, and that remains an area in which I have considerable expertise.
However, the fundamentals of good management — setting direction, leading people, understanding performance, making decisions, allocating resources and delivering results — are relevant far beyond one industry.
The programme is therefore designed around the individual manager and the challenges they are facing rather than a particular sector.
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No.
This is an individual development programme rather than a training course.
We will establish objectives at the beginning, but your real leadership challenges provide much of the material we work with during the six months.
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Yes.
Confidentiality is fundamental to an effective coaching relationship.
For employer-sponsored programmes, we agree boundaries before starting so that the participant, sponsor and coach are all clear about what will and will not be shared.
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Sessions are normally held online.
Face-to-face sessions can be arranged where appropriate, subject to location, availability and any additional travel costs.
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Yes.
There is a separate employer-sponsored programme designed specifically for organisations investing in a leader's development.
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Yes.
Additional 75-minute sessions can be arranged following completion of the programme if further support would be valuable.
Individual: £250 per session
Employer-sponsored: £350 per session
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Book a Discovery Session.
There is no obligation to proceed.
We'll talk about what you want to achieve, I'll explain how I work, you can ask whatever you need to ask and we'll decide whether there is a good fit.
Start with a conversation
You don't need to know exactly what six months of development should look like before getting in touch.
That's partly the point.
If you have a sense of where you want to get to — or simply know that something could be better — we can start there.
Book a complimentary 30-minute Discovery Session.
No obligation. No hard sell. Just a useful conversation about where you are, where you want to get to and whether I can help.
Better thinking. Better leadership. Better decisions.
A six-month, one-to-one development programme for business leaders who want the space to think, be challenged and develop their capability — while dealing with the realities of actually running a business, store, region or function.