I’ve never had any formal executive leadership coaching. However, when Sara contacted me, I was ready to give it a shot. It turned out to be a great decision. The best thing about Sara is that she works hard to understand who you are as a human being, not just as a leader. What started out for me as a professional experiment turned into a personal journey of self discovery which has been helpful across all aspects of my life. As a result, Sara has honed a toolbox of skills within me to help deal with a vast array of leadership challenges. I’ve made tangible changes to how I approach various aspects of my role including coaching direct reports to maximize their potential, changing the way I approach decision making and problem solving as a leader, diversifying my thinking and the team, and understanding the difference between useful and useless anxiety. I’ve been so impressed with Sara that she is now coaching other key people within my studio and already they are seeing tangible results too. I would recommend Sara without hesitation to anyone who is looking to coach either themselves or members of their organization. She will not disappoint!

I wanted to do coaching because you do get to a point where you start to plateau. And as soon as I felt that, I thought, I've got to find some way of having a learning mechanism for myself to develop further. Right from the start, I could just see that Sara gets me, understands what my pain points are, and has business experience herself. A lot of coaches that I've been told about or come across don't have that. They are almost academic. And I think what I found with Sara was that she’s done all of that entrepreneur experience, and has then decided to go into coaching. Because that's then relatable to me. I thought we would be much more superficial in dealing with challenges and new learnings, but I found myself unearthing unexpected things. Sometimes it's like working with a diagnostician. It was really profound to learn that these, even, childhood influences, and people around you have such a profound effect in how you see the world. And I think a lot of that is this huge, revelatory kind of moment where you're like, "that's why I do that. Let’s choose to do different." I think some of the big tangible highlights for me were stopping always chasing revenue growth (something that has been a really difficult thing to change). And a refocus towards profitability, rather than chasing revenue, that was really useful to me, because that was part of my real growth through this process. And one of the other really big ones, I think, has been the way I coach others. So coaching other people through a lot of their issues, and a lot of my teams, I'm often spending a lot of effort coaching them. But now I have a step formula that I picked up from our work on how I do that. Whereas before, it was very haphazard. I was spending hours with different team members, and meaning well, but probably, just haphazardly trying to coach them. It saves me a lot of time, it's appreciated, and it has really great results. Sara gets the business world and gets the coaching world. She’s invested heavily into improving herself. So, anyone with a growth mindset will really benefit from that, because you're pairing up, with someone who's got a growth mindset themselves, and, and really understands that they've got to be building themselves up further and further. Learning never stops. I can recommend that Sara is someone who's able to bring the best out in people. I think that's a natural ability. I think some people are born with it. And she’s recognized that and is able to really utilize it, in a way that relates directly to the business environment.

I felt I wanted to do coaching because I was inspired by the character Wendy Rhoades on the Netflix series, Billions, where she helps people achieve their highest level of performance. I personally felt that it was important to have an independent sounding board to ensure that I am at my highest level. One of the things that Sara helped me with was shifting mental blocks and anchors (that I didn’t even realise were there). I needed to break those mental cycles, push past my fears and blockers to drive forward. I really got my ‘mojo’ back through working with Sara. Some tangible business results that have transformed the business and put us on the path to 10X growth this year include: Transition from the kind of clients that we were working with (too many small customers that were draining our time and energy). We strategically focused the business towards higher margin, larger enterprise customers. We are now targeting big, brand name companies and getting some traction going! As a leader, I wanted to be in control. I realised that I needed to make smart, hiring decisions. I hired a Chief Fun Officer to motivate our team, by introducing more fun at work (especially whilst working remotely). I always felt I was dragging my team along, but I gave my team some opportunities to step up, perform and ideate. I found that supporting my team and providing these opportunities to my team led to greatly increased performance. My team are now taking responsibility, and I feel like they are really in it. Our attrition rate has now fallen from 30% to 0% in the last couple of months. I navigated issues in my personal life and resolved those issues, so I had more time and energy to focus on making the business a success. Intangibly, I got back my spark and my energy. I had almost ‘forgotten’ that I’d done this before, due to having lost my mojo. I’d built successful businesses in the past, and I knew I could do it again. The greater my energy levels, the greater the energy of my team. We are now much more resilient to the challenges that business life throws at us! I would not hesitate to recommend Sara to entrepreneurs and business leaders!