When you’re running a business, you’re competing with every other provider in your industry for the same customers. You’re always trying to think differently, do things better, change your strategy or your tactics to win more business, improve margins, gain market share or come up with some game changing product or process that puts you in front.

But, you’re often working with the same tools, systems and opportunities that your competitors are using as well. Sometimes there’s not much you can do about pricing, or production efficiency. Sometimes you’re up against legislative or market conditions that are completely outside of your control.

There’s no denying that running business is a tough, competitive and increasingly stressful undertaking – and that true competitive advantages are rare and valuable.

The standard clichés that get thrown around boardrooms and conferences about your people being your greatest asset are usually nothing more than filler in the midst of some theoretical presentation or sales pitch and almost no-one stops to consider that it might actually be true.

So, if we agree that your people really are your key competitive advantage, the one area of your business where your competitors cannot compete head to head – then it makes sense to start looking at how you’re leading and developing your team.

And this isn’t a once off exercise where you take everyone away for 2 days of team building or send your senior managers to some management-training course.

Unfortunately, most of the retreats, programs and courses out there are as good as useless when it comes to delivering results. Yes we said it. You may as well take your money and put it all on black. Or head to Bali for a week of 5-star luxury.

Why? Because they’re created by people who have zero real-world experience successfully leading teams of people to achieve specific objectives in stressful conditions, helping a team of people learn to effectively communicate, make decisions and execute plans – and at best these academics have a very basic and limited understanding about what works and why, and they create these modules for courses that are off-the-shelf feel good box-ticking exercises at best – often years out of date.

We refer to them as fairy floss… Sweet at the time and dissolve rapidly.

If you think it through, there really is no other truly unique competitive advantage though. Everything else is fair game – and is often exactly the same!

Websites, ordering and payment systems, customer service solutions, pricing strategies, manufacturing efficiencies and sometimes even the products themselves are much the same across industries these days – with even lower end offerings in the IT and software space delivering near enterprise system level advantages.

Capital isn’t the barrier to entry it once was and with new business models evolving all the time (think Uber and crowd funding) it can feel like a race against the clock to find the next opportunity or risk being overtaken or worse made obsolete.

Add to this the daily pressure of managing teams of people who each have specific roles and their own strengths, weaknesses, habits, preferences and opinions – and trying to get them all to work together effectively.

A program designed for you based on your specific business, goals, resources, industry and the issues you may have in your team – created and delivered by a proven leadership specialists with real-world hands-on experience delivering results over the course of weeks to a few months depending on your business goals.

Sounds great right? Only thing is where do you go to find that? (And ideally not have to pay $25k per person).

It’s not an easy answer, and most small businesses have given up trying to implement leadership development or teambuilding initiatives because of the significant cost and disruption to the business and the insignificant results delivered.

We designed our Exec Lead & Exec Team programs specifically to solve this problem for small business. Based on our combined experience working in both military leadership and corporate leadership roles – we wanted to bring together the best of both military and strategic business planning to give our clients a true competitive advantage.

It was a real challenge for us to create a program we were proud to stand behind and put our names to because neither of us would accept anything less than a world-class program – but it still needed to be affordable and accessible for small businesses.

To be effective we designed the program so the content is based on current real world examples, is experienced in a different way to the usual boring classroom style lesson and most importantly delivers real tangible results for our clients.

You won’t find any of the same old trite theoretical rubbish in our programs (or on our website for that matter) because we believe in being real with our clients upfront.

Yes, it will cost you some money to engage us. Yes, it’s also going to cost you some time to brief us so we can design your program for the best possible results. And yes, your people will inevitably have to spend some time away from their core responsibilities.

No, it won’t be all fun and games; there is work involved for the individual participants and sometimes they may initially believe they will not like it. No, Exec Lead & Team is not a magic bullet promising overnight miracles, but we will promise results.

But back to the good news… Yes, our programs are designed for minimum disruption and maximum participant engagement. Yes, we have worked hard to make sure that our sessions are as short as possible to keep the energy high and the disruption to your business low. Yes, we are real people who use real empathy, humour and experience to connect with and develop your people. Yes we deliver the program ourselves and don’t outsource it to some ‘certified’ trainer.

And we’re proud to say that all our clients have said they got more than they expected, better results than they’d thought possible and thoroughly enjoyed the process of working with us.

Some of the most popular modules in our programs are: