September Newsletter

Why 'good enough never is', motorbike 'v' golf and more: view our September newsletter right here http://bit.ly/19c6ir

GENI Video

Chris Baxter and members of the North East JCI

Check out our new video of Chris talking to members of the North East chapter of the JCI

How To Use Your Comfort Zones To Drive Personal Growth.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsjakSgEyFY

August Newsletter

View our August newsletter right here: http://bit.ly/8fyz1 - If you like it and want to sign up for further issues click here: http://bit.ly/CErGE

Coaching as a Profession: Licensed? Registered? Chartered? Regulated?

Is it important for coaching to be considered a profession?

Mark Joyella, a journalist and American TV anchor, recently wrote this article for coaching magazine 'The Coaching Commons' instigated and featuring our very own Chris Baxter.

Click here to read the article in full: http://bit.ly/1Pb3AO

Directive Coaching: The Art of Offering Answers Maximising Client Learning

Date: Tuesday 7th July 2009
Time: 6pm for a 6:30pm start, 8pm finish then networking time
Venue: Toby Carvery, Ponteland Road, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE3 3TY, Tel: 0191 214 0877
Website: www.tobycarvery.co.uk/find-a-toby/kentonbank.html
Price: £20.00 members (£17.39 exc VAT), £35.00 non-members (£30.44 exc VAT)
Speakers: Chris Baxter, Professional Coach and Director of GENI (Good Enough Never is Limited)

Click here sign up for this event.

Using Your Comfort Zones to Drive Personal Growth

JCI North East presents: Using Your Comfort Zones to Drive Personal Growth

Where: Quorum Business Park
When: Thursday 18th June 2009
Time: 6pm – 7:30pm
Cost: Free to JCI members, Non-members charge £10
Food on arrival: Beer and pizza, sponsored by Papa John’s Cramlington.

To book please email: sally.kevan@inst.riba.org or call Sally Kevan on 0191 261 7441

Head to Head - Entrepreneurs' Forum

Sean Costigan has a 'Head to Head' with Chris Baxter

Franchising – a quick route to business success or the nemesis of entrepreneurialism? In this month’s Head to Head a former top franchisee Chris Baxter who has now gone it alone with his own business GENI meets one of the world’s top franchisees within the AlphaGraphics network, Sean Costigan.

Sean left school at the age of 16 and worked his way up in the print business beginning as a trainee. After several years experiencing every department within a print firm, he joined a paper merchant to make a move into sales. Having always wanted to be in business himself, he got to know the Middlesbrough AlphaGraphics franchisees and was asked to take over the business in its second year due to the franchisees going their separate ways. The franchise started out as a print shop in Middlesbrough with five employees and in the last fourteen years Sean has grown it to become the second largest AlphaGraphics business in the world. Based in Stockton, Newcastle and Sunderland (there are 260 sites world-wide), with £5m+turnover and 80 employees in the region.

Business coach extraordinaire, Chris Baxter, left school at 18 in 1984 when there were over 3m unemployed and got a job in a builders’ merchants for a couple of years where he admits the best thing he learnt was common sense.

He went on to learn Japanese management principles at Komatsu and Nissan in the 1990’s. Chris admits he’s never worked anywhere for longer than five years, so true to form he got bored with the relentless pressure of the automotive industry, where he says ‘there was never any celebration.’

He then learned the dynamic pace of working for a food packaging company in Durham, where product lifecycles were short, working with a constant churn of change. Later he worked for a FMCG company that was bought out by P & G, so Chris took the decision to take redundancy and study a full-time MBA at Durham University Business School.

After a brief spell with Durham Pine as supply chain director he decided to ‘go it alone’ one week after his 40th birthday and looked into the white collar franchises. He joined the Ology business coaching franchise where he became the consistently top performing franchisee in the UK. After four years with Ology Chris has launched his own coaching business GENI (Good Enough Never Is).

Sean asks Chris: 1. Having been involved with a franchised business in the past, what would you say is the main reason for wanting to now go it alone with GENI?

After four years I realised that franchising doesn’t suit business coaching. Constant innovation was what made me successful; offering tailored solutions for clients. Franchises are more formulaic, with a hammer and nail approach, and usually a very narrow band of products and services. My first big success was a very celebrated company, always in the press, that had come to see Ology, and we had no off-the-shelf solution. I created a bespoke programme for them and it worked but the franchise weren’t happy I stepped outside the model.

Business coaches have to be flexible. You also have to have lots of business experience. Going it alone with my own business GENI allows me to constantly innovate and benefit commercially as I own the intellectual property of my programmes.


2. What do you think makes a good franchisee and what was the main difference between the most and least successful ones that you have come across?

Comfort zones. The people who typically buy business coaching franchises are at a crossroads in their career and often don’t have a burning entrepreneurial passion. The less successful franchisees have never stepped out of the ‘employee’ mindset. The ones who have approached it with a business owner mindset have done well. Some corporates with six figure salaries that were high flyers were useless as franchisees! I trained new franchisees as I always did the best sales. At the end of the day it came down to attitude.


3. In terms of timing, the decision to go into business on your own is challenging to say the least! At a time that the economy is struggling, what are the main areas in which you can use you experience to help your potential clients?

At one level, there has never been a better time to use a coach. Every person has to perform better than ever before. Coaching gets managers to raise their game. The first budget that can get cancelled is training but the statistics show that companies who invest in training are twice as likely to survive a recession.

Decision making is taking longer and people are spending less money so five figure contracts are rare, but customers are willing to spend a bit less and repeat it when it works - so there are opportunities.

Return on Investment in business coaching is hard to quantify; if I am just coaching one manager there is no way I can claim bottom line success. However we always track progress against clear goals in those cases. One company I am working with at the moment is on a paid-on-results basis; my target is to pretty much double their profits.


4. In setting up your business recently, what have been your biggest hurdles and how have you managed to cross them?

The first hurdle was getting freed from my franchisor Ology, as they weren’t particularly happy to lose their top franchisee. It took three months to agree a settlement but in the end it went quite quickly.

We needed to raise some money first which was lots of paperwork, but wasn’t a huge hurdle. We found it remarkably easy to raise a loan from the bank. There were no problems with my existing bank, as I had a good track record. The timing was good; I asked when lending behaviour had improved a bit. Six months earlier and it might have been more difficult. Business Link were also very supportive.

5. As an entrepreneur and an independent business, what are your targets and goals for the next five years and why do you think you can achieve this on your own rather than with a wider network of franchised businesses?

I’d like to set up three or four related businesses around leadership development. There is a coaching a school in Canada where I train, so I am talking to them about setting one up in the UK. I also want to do more writing and speaking, and there is a book in the pipeline.

I think I’d like to have a portfolio of interests; lots of things that will keep me interested.


Chris to Sean 1. What made you decide to get into a franchise business in the first place rather than go it alone?

The main reason was that it was an industry that the partners who opened the business in Middlesbrough didn’t understand. They bought into the financial model and the initial marketing support as well as the strong technology driven brand. I liked the idea of joining AlphaGraphics as it is backed by Pindar, the Scarborough based family-owned print company. It is also part of a worldwide organisation that in the 80’s and 90’s created a buzz concept of technology-driven design and print. It was a proven business, which was tried and tested so was seen as a safer bet as 80% of franchises succeed as compared to the reverse in owner-managed enterprises.

I was quite impressed with the AlphaGraphics franchise when I sold paper to it earlier in my career. They were on average four or five times bigger than anyone else in the same market, and they were still relatively new to the UK. I liked the brand and the business offering, and there was no real risk to me, as the franchise they had already been trading for two years in this region. However, I took a pay cut and gave up benefits - going from working in a 9-5 job to a full 7 days was a shock to the system, but you have to meet customer demand to succeed.

2. What advice would you offer to people thinking of buying a franchise that would help them get the best from their investment?

Look at a five to ten year plan. A two or three year plan always looks pretty rosy when you are led by the franchisor during the business planning process ahead of signing up. If you can grow the business over a ten year period, you can become a great deal less reliant on the franchisor, and push the model.

Calculating a break point or a cap on royalties is also key, we hit that point in seven or eight years when the benefit you get as being part of a franchised business outweighs the royalties that you are paying. It is imperative that this discussion is part of the initial negotiation.

I’d also ask, can the person sell? Franchises that I have seen fail are the ones who can’t sell. They think if they just put a sign above the door, business will come. You have to sell the business and get out and front it, especially in the early years.

I’d suggest they meet as many existing franchisees as they can, new and old, big and small, as this will give them a clearer picture; the real story.

People need to be cautious, sometimes small print gets missed. Buying a franchise means you are committing for 10- 20 years, not just 12 months.

3. How do you manage being entrepreneurial and staying within the boundaries defined by your franchise contract?

I have always got involved with franchisor, and taken an active part in initiatives like leadership committees and marketing groups, this has allowed me to have my input into group strategy. Because ours is a technology-driven business, if we invest as individual businesses, we become experts. AlphaGraphics then asks us as business leaders to pioneer those products and services.

There are branding restrictions, but we convinced AlphaGraphics we need a sub brand to sell our high level marketing strategy services recently. Spending time on things like this allows you to have a say in how the company develops.


4. Your Stockton branch is the UK flagship branch. What are the secrets of your success, what do you do better than other franchisees?

It is the second largest AlphaGraphics franchise in the world, out of 260. We got there because we are always talking to our customers and we get out and help them develop marketing strategies that add value to their business. We’ve always been hungry to get on and grow the business and we believe in innovation. We had made investments in technology, for instance we have a full suite of multi-channel marketing products that allows us to provide communication solutions in print, e-mail, SMS and personalised web pages. Typically we have made these investments 18 months ahead of the competition.

We have recruited good people, and the business has grown up with quite a young team. Enthusiastic, intelligent and tech-savvy graduates started at the bottom and worked their way up to the management team by being nurtured. We also have good understanding of the financial numbers and plans, which gives us a good reporting structure, so problems highlight themselves early.

5. What do you like most about being a franchisee, and what would you most like to change?

I like being part of a worldwide network of different cultures. I have made good friends and have done lots of travelling. This exposed me to people with different social and cultural backgrounds.

I have access to the latest research on technology and we are a leader in the area of e-commerce in the UK within the printing sector. Being linked to a US based franchisor helped in this area particularly.

I’d like to change restrictive stuff like some of the branding, restrictions on the décor and logo, but we are working on that. Also the amount of royalties we pay! If we’d have known how far we would have grown fifteen years ago we would have negotiated a bit harder.

There are more positives than negatives -our next franchise conference is in Chicago! My view is that if you are getting 75% value out of what you spend with the franchisor then you are doing the right thing. I am a business owner that just happens to have a franchise.

Head to Head is run in conjunction with The Entrepreneurs’ Forum - a membership organisation that brings together business owners at all stages of their journey to share experiences, knowledge and support. The Forum runs a series of events throughout the year around the region. They also run a mentoring programme to help people running growth businesses benefit from the wisdom of more established entrepreneurs. For more details go to www.entrepreneursforum.net.

CHRIS LAUNCHES GENI-US BUSINESS IDEA

Photo Caption: (Left to right) Heather and Chris Baxter have launched GENI.

A BUSINESS coach who has gained years of experience in guiding top entrepreneurs to build their businesses has decided to take the leap of faith and go it alone.

Chris Baxter, 44, from Houghton le Spring has set up his own business coaching company, Good Enough Never Is (GENI) after being the UK’s leading franchisee for global coaching network Ology for four years.

Teaming up with his wife Heather Baxter who has 16 years’ experience in the recruitment industry, the duo intend to mix business coaching with a specialised people finder service to help businesses grow through optimum people performance.

GENI’s performance and leadership coaching and team development programmes are delivered either in teams through a series of training workshops on issues such as delegation and behavioural attitude, or via one to one coaching with business owners, directors, and managers.

Chris, who is a professionally trained coach and facilitator, is also currently writing a book called “The Effectiveness Map”, which will be launched in early 2010.

He said: “GENI is dedicated to helping businesses learn how to be brilliant. We help people to produce excellent performance at work, because every organisation will only ever be as good as the people who work there.

“I decided to set up my own coaching business as I was Ology’s top performing franchisee for several years and I felt like I had taken it as far as it could go. GENI allows me to have greater control over the content of the coaching sessions and I can add my own ideas and psychologies to the training.

“I have since developed my own psychology-based model for understanding and transforming individual performance, which I can now implement into my own coaching sessions.

“I have a ‘fearless thinking’ approach in that great performance only comes from great people working together to produce great results.”

Heather Baxter said: “We work with businesses to help them identify where they want to be and how to get there practically and promptly.

“Now not only can Chris offer coaching to businesses but we can also help them fill that gap when it comes to finding the right person for a particular role, which sometimes businesses aren’t fully skilled at doing.

“Whatever we do, individually tailored, bottom line impact and tangible benefit is the name of our game.”

Chris’s past clients include, CJ Garland & Co, CTC Marine Projects, Imass, ITPS, Bastion Security Installations, Kromek, Arriva, and The Specials Laboratory.

Before he entered the coaching industry, Chris worked for a number of manufacturing companies in the North East, which included roles in planning, purchasing, systems management, project management, warehouse, distribution, and ultimately becoming a supply chain director.

Chris is trained to International Coach Federation standards, is a member of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), and has a MBA from Durham Business School.