FIT TO LEAD
Scaling with impact
What my clients say about CEO coachingRead on for first-hand insights into what CEO coaching could look like for you, and the impact it will have on your leadership, legacy, and company valuation.
Mark is a gifted individual. He brings experience, perspective and humanity to every conversation. A brilliant listener Mark will help you find your own path and purpose, and give you practical tools and tips to make management and life even more rewarding.
The time I spend with Mark is invaluable and energising. He is helping me become the leader I want to be, to look at challenges from different perspectives and to think more strategically. He is helping me develop this strategic muscle and to help me help my team become the best they can become. He is very insightful and also extremely knowledgeable and experienced in coaching/business methodologies and frameworks. As he is talking to Founder CEOs all the time and understands the journey so well, having Mark as a coach is like having multiple other Founder CEOs to talk to at the same time.
My time spent working with Mark has been a valuable investment. When it comes to the challenges faced by leading a start-up, as a successful entrepreneur and investor himself, Mark simply “gets it”. He is a great listener and thoughtful strategist and creates a trusted space to explore key challenges. Through patience and persistence, he skilfully helps you find your own answers. And they are the answers that you need to create sustainable and fundamental change, rather than the answers that you initially think you need! He has helped me with my personal and professional development. Mark is a fantastic coach.
Working with Mark over the last 6 months has been excellent as our business has grown with key leadership talent growing within the business and the CEO role morphing into one of supporting and leading the team. What keeps me coming back and will continue to do so is learning more about what I don’t know. You can read as many books as one has time for but that is a poor substitute for a live coach with deep practical knowledge in business leadership introducing these concepts and techniques at the right time in our business growth journey.
I have been fortunate enough to play major roles in multiple ventures that scale quickly. Working with a coach like Mark has been enormously helpful throughout this roller coaster journey – he is empathic and enables me to find balance on critical topics that I face on a daily basis. I enjoy the openness of our sessions where he will challenge me to think about a topic more deeply or approach in a different way. He brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to my armoury as well as a mix of theory and practice that he shares. If you’re interested in becoming a better CEO I would recommend working with Mark.
Mark’s combination of being a business coach and a business angel, with many years of working with entrepreneurs, is a key reason I chose him. Mark has a highly connected, insightful, and inquisitive style of coaching. His preparation and research for our sessions is always impressive, as is his ability to recall and draw upon learnings from previous sessions. Because Mark’s approach to coaching is ‘all in’, I feel equally challenged and at ease during our work together. Mark is in equal measure a skillful enabler, an empathetic coach, an astute mentor, and a results-focused partner to his clients.
Mark is a Swiss-army knife of guidance, supporting & empowering me to achieve both personal growth and professional outcomes.
He has constructively challenged and reshaped my assumptions about myself, my working environment and my role, all for the better.
Mark works effortlessly at a number of different layers, from the very high level and strategic through to practical challenges around leadership and commercial growth, and the nitty-gritty of specific situations and relationships.
Trade Ledger engaged the services of Fit To Lead / Make Happy in 2021 to support the development and rollout of our strategy for the business to 2024. This included scoping the work to be done, receiving input from all staff in the organisation, and engaging with the leadership in advance of a 2 day strategy session/workshop. Make Fit To Lead / Make Happy facilitated the successful sessions that covered discussions around priorities, targets, timelines, and agreed outcomes and communication.
At all times, Jonathan and Mark were fully engaged in the process: a process that was designed by them and provided a framework for Trade Ledger to successfully conclude this important piece of work.
We would have no hesitation in engaging Fit To Lead / Make Happy again, and in recommending them to other institutions looking for support in running important workshops for their business.
CCEP Ventures worked with Mark and Fit to Lead for an assessment of the founders and leadership team of a potential investment target.
Using their combined experience and expertise of VC, HR and Coaching Mark and Fit to Lead were able to curate a methodology which gave us the insights on the leadership team to make fully informed decisions.
The objective was to assess if the leadership team was ready or had the capabilities to scale with the company; and if not, how that could be achieved with a follow-up coaching programme.
The leadership team evaluation was a combination of external assessments (3x Hogan), 360 degrees feedback, a team questionnaire and individual interviews. I believe this provided very insightful findings from multiple points-of-view on the key strengths and areas for development of the team.
Further, Mark and Debbie worked very efficiently and managed the assignment under a tight planning. Personally, I also liked the open and frequent quick updates on progress or issues to ensure a smooth process.
The final report and presentation of results was very clear and to-the-point. This facilitated sharing the headline findings in a wider group for alignment on next steps.
CCEP Ventures looks forward to work again with Mark and Fit-to-Lead and I recommend them to anyone who needs thorough assessment of leadership teams.