IN THE MEDIA: Supercharge your meetings
Source: Sydney Morning Herald If attending meetings ever becomes an Olympic event, Jacob Aldridge will be in gold medal contention. The business and senior strategy coach at Shirlaws coaching company estimates he has sat through 4712 meetings in his dealings with more than 250 small businesses since 2006. “I’ve seen the good, the great and…
Creating Beautiful Testimonials
I recently published my ‘Testimonial’ page, although in true Jacob Aldridge fashion I named it ‘Shameless Praise‘. The motivation should be obvious (testimonials and recommendations about my amazing work add credibility to my writing and proposals), and some recent submissions from the KPI Enterprise program and a few newspaper articles prompted me to complete this.…
Born 1978 – 1982? Your retirement day will be uniquely awful!
I was born in 1981. This means I, and those born a couple of years either side, are singularly placed for our retirement plans to be screwed by a combination of demographics and economic cycles. The good news is we can, as individuals, do something about this (and collectively, we will still be able to…
2 Articles: Separating Consultants from Coaches
It’s a common question: what is the difference between a business consultant and a business coach? Pedants will observe that a pure consultant brings the solution and completes the work themselves – think IT or Legal, for example. A pure coach does nothing but ask questions, ‘coaching’ you because all the answers are inside you…
A Day on the Job: Business Coach (2007)
In mid-2007, Brisbane’s Courier-Mail newspaper interviewed me for their Career One section feature: A Day on the Job. At the time I was about a year into my business coaching career. Since the article is no longer online, I have chosen to publish my answers here with a short note at the end about what has changed…
List of Meaningless Business Coaching Words
Today’s content comes from my colleagues in the UK – as part of their most recent conference (in beautiful Manchester!) the team had a short, sharp exercise listing some commonly used business coaching words … that mean absolutely nothing to our clients and prospects! Key choices: Strategy Growth Context Innovation Leadership Structure which puts a…
Sounds Reasonable
I’m 32 1/2 years old. My next birthday will be 33, and I will enter what some people refer to as ‘the Jesus year‘. For a whole combination of random thoughts intersecting, it occurred to me that I’m already working towards a nifty plan for the time period roughly associated with that year. Basically, I’m…
3 Simple Sales Tips
I had the pleasure last month of spending two days with Nic Rixon running an internal Shirlaws Sales Conference. I’ve also just delivered two full days, one in Melbourne and one in Sydney, working the KPI alumni group on this topic as well. Needless to say, there have been loads of great frameworks, tips, and…
Happy Easter!
I think I stole this from Dave Barry’s blog, back in the days before I had my own business and was therefore dedicated to his many, many productivity enhancers. Every year I bring it out again, and I still love it! So Happy Easter everybody! If you leave me, can I come too…? Click…