What Inspired Melior Esse?
Around the age of 28 I attended my first genuine corporate leadership training event. It was only a couple of days, courtesy of the L&D budget of Cable & Wireless, but it was to become one of the most significant workshops I’ve ever attended. We were told to visualise our desk and environment in 5 years’ time, and to my surprise I was seeing myself at home running my own business, and hardly anyone worked from home in the mid-nineties! That led to me resigning to go freelance as a Programme Director, and before I had time to get a solid proposition together, I was offered the opportunity to join a start-up telco business in the midlands, run by an ambitious entrepreneur with a solid track record and financial backing. I joined, and four years later I eventually moved on having helped, in my role as Operations Director, establish it as the leader in its niche market. That business has been through various ownership since, but it is still going strong. Those four years taught me more about business and people than at any other point in my career. I had to transition from corporate mindset, by which I mean big budgets, narrow focus of responsibility, limited risk and exposure, no real sense of the value of money as it was someone else’s, time being important, but not always of the essence, to start-up mindset, which often relies on dynamic fast thinking, exposure, being the decision maker for so many things, not only to grasp the fundamentals of every function in the business but often perform it, treating every penny as if it was your own, and above all else an absolute can do/must do attitude. All of that was hard enough, but the biggest adjustment was understanding and learning to work with the mindset and working style of an entrepreneurial thinker. I loved it. It was so rewarding. I then spent some time back in the large corporate world running national programmes before making a career move into the training industry, spending over 10 years focused on leadership and people development. The original desire to run my own business never diminished, I just couldn’t work out my USP. Now it has naturally come together for me as I have realised that the two strong passions in my career are working at driving the growth of SME environments and developing people. Add to that the ingredient that my natural discipline is organising, structuring, ensuring clarity and bringing pragmatism to leadership decisions whilst bringing hearts and minds with you, the Melior Esse purpose has emerged. My ambition is to build a team that helps many more businesses on the journey that I have been lucky enough to experience. Thank you for reading my first blog, and if our paths get to cross, I look forward to buying the first coffee and getting to know a bit about you! Vince