Business West

Business Evolution was invited by Business West and Exponential Training & Assessment to deliver a series of ten induction days across the South West of England for prospective high growth business coaches on Business West’s new high growth business support programmes.

Business West and its partners successfully secured European Regional Development Funding (ERDF) to deliver three new high growth business support and development programmes (Starting a High Growth Business, Coaching for High Growth and Understanding Finance for Business) following a rigorous tender process and a recognition that the South West must focus on improving business competitiveness and employment by shifting towards high-quality business generating high value added activity. The new high growth business support programmes commenced in January 2011 and will run until June 2013. They are expected to provide significant economic benefits to the region including the creation of new jobs and the safeguarding of current jobs, skills development in the workforce, uplift in business revenue and enhanced business performance. The programmes are expected to touch a total of 989 businesses in the South West.

To support businesses through these three new programmes, Business West looked to engage around 120 High Growth Business Coaches: highly experienced individuals with extensive board level understanding and in-depth experience in growing a business and achieving success. The ten day–long roadshows across the region hosted by Business West provided prospective High Growth Business Coaches with information on the 3 programmes, and with some development and training from a highly experienced, qualified and award-winning High Growth Business Coach, Sarah Coleman of Business Evolution.

Sarah used a variety of development methods when she led the workshops. "We recognise that people learn in different ways and so we always use a wide variety of methods in our development programmes", said Sarah "We aim to make our programmes fun, but most definitely challenging and thought-provoking. Many of those in the room were experienced and qualified coaches themselves, so setting the bar higher. This meant that I had the very real challenge of keeping them engaged and interested throughout the day! The feedback was that they especially prized my "war stories", examples and tales of my own hands-on experience of high growth business coaching both good and bad".