Current Client Testimonials

Steve, I wish to express my gratitude for your assistance in my moving to a more complete and self-aware business leader.

Your unique and highly effective approach has garnered results that have exceeded my expectations and curbed my inherent scepticism as it relates to "how to be a better manager" type solutions. Your coaching method has provided a regime that has allowed me to be a more effective manager of people, strategic planner and executor of mandates.

I have found your approach to be practical and personal focusing not so much on business philosophy or " boxed" solutions but more so introspection and a shifting of perspectives and paradigms. I also appreciated the fact that within a few sessions you demonstrated an intuitive understanding of my thinking style and nature of the business that I am in. This made for a comfortable and open exchange during which I felt you indeed knew where I was coming from and what I was taking about.

I have found that the rigour of our time together yielded sustainable and tangible results predicated upon sound rationale and intuitive discovery. The effect of our high impact time together resonated almost immediately and was felt not only by me but also by my direct reports and peers.

You're personable nature and heartfelt support only added to the value outcomes and what I trust will be a continuing association.

"High impact leadership" and "helping leaders drive growth" live up to the tag line thanks to your coaching techniques.

Steve has worked with Ontario Region of Environment Canada as we have been exploring approaches to get to know our clients better. This is a new approach for our department, and Steve and his team have brought us ideas from their previous experience, and successfully helped us adapt them. Steve is a consummate professional, working with very technical and specialized people, helping us develop empathy for clients and understanding the complex stakeholder needs.

As a coach, Steve has made an enormous impact on my personal effectiveness. Within weeks of starting to work with him, his advice was being put to work, and the results were tangible and positive. His insights are powerful, and his approach is practical. But beyond that, in his work with me as a leader, he has driven me to strategic considerations that have influenced the overall direction of the business and enhanced our client and sales focus...Improved leadership effectiveness has been leveraged to organizational results with surprising speed.

Steve’s advice is progressive and value-added, and rooted in a wealth of practical experience. He simplifies, distills and crystallizes complex situations and ideas into actionable plans, and follows through to ensure they succeed.

Dear Steve,

I wanted to provide this feedback to you and thank you for the high impact your work has provided to me.

There are several things that have made your work with me very effective:

Several years ago our firm purchased management and leadership assessments and they were based entirely on objective, numerical surveys. There is a lot of merit to numerical ratings, but we are humans and I don't think everything can be boiled down to numbers.

Your commitment to understanding the qualitative and human environment was very helpful and gave me additional detailed feedback based on how people actually experience me, not just how they scored me on a pencil and paper test. People who were involved in the process told me that they found the meeting, and your questions very useful, they felt they could trust you and give you information that would help me. There is so much you learned from them, based on your questioning and observing of their body language. This also gave you a picture of how I operate. People who met you all said that they were very comfortable with you, that you are a great interviewer and helped them understand and explain important things. The insight you gained has helped me a lot with real situations.

You made me comfortable almost instantaneously. Your approach is very practical and based on my real situation. You tailor your ideas to my practice and my style.

I feel that you have an accurate picture of our company and firm. It is real and specific, not general, so your coaching is very valuable. Because your experience and your understanding of us, your advice/coaching is very practical and relevant.

The "instant" coaching, when I call you on something that comes up, has been great has helped a lot. Having a long-term relationship is important to me. You have gone beyond "here is the report" to help me react and better handle situations. When we have scheduled meetings, it forces me push myself to think beyond getting tasks done and be more effective, more proactive and more strategically.

You have helped me be a more effective leader and "be more myself"! I wish I had done this ten years before, I think my success would have caused less pain, and helped me use my owns strengths better!

Steve helps take the general – it might be leadership theory, it might be a framework for clarifying accountability, it might be our corporate strategy – and he helps make it practical and real for people.

I have had many people, of very different styles and capabilities, talk to me about Steve’s ability to help them better understand problems or challenges, how to handle them and how to make themselves and others more effective.

Steve is like middleware – he helps us take ideas, adapt them to our reality and implement them.

Steve is very good at gaining people’s confidence, maintaining integrity. Because of this people are willing to share any personal and organizational insights, confident of his maintaining confidence. He is able to help them see solutions, recognizing their own perspectives, to help them in their team context and also to coach and support their own development.

Steve was an important part of our transformation. It was clear that it was going to be a remarkable and unique journey. Over the months, I heard and saw many touching examples of personal development. Steve played a very important role in improving people’s lives. He should feel very proud.

We have had to take a sales organization, turn it around, tear it down and rebuild while running it. It looks like it is on track: the first four months of 2002 the sales results were over plan – the first time in almost ten years.

We created a strategy that we believed would make a difference. Foresters is a unique organization with clients/members and community investment in many communities across the U.S. Our strategy had a lot of moving parts, and we developed a very ambitious implementation plan. We had a lot to do – fast – with many state-of-the-art components that were developed separately but had to work together; totally new field leadership to be recruited and oriented; regional leadership teams to be high performing fast; new tools and systems implemented as available, each representing progress toward the desired state and each demanding new learning and adaptation.

Steve became part of our senior team and was a key part of driving radical transformation, setting the strategic agenda and then taking implementation right down to the ground. He has valuable experience with high-performing U.S. and Canadian sales organizations. And in a sales system, 80% of your success is people. He gets people. He gets sales systems. He gets integrating and connecting tools and systems to make sure they work.

Steve gets sales systems. He gets the balance between organizational (bureaucratic) needs and individual, entrepreneurial needs of the sales professional. He can pace an aggressive sales leader, demonstrating equal urgency and focus. He can also support and stretch them. His coaching is relevant to their individual style and strengths, while also helping them align their actions with our strategy and the behaviors and results that will get them rewarded.

Steve helped us design and implement the leadership and sales force selection systems. He personally interviewed, "sold" and drove the orientation/integration of nine regional executives.

Steve is very strong at team performance. His individual insight and coaching become a very powerful and practical basis for team formation.

Steve’s strengths are in integration – he can bring together people and concepts to make them effective. He pulls different elements together – tools and systems that are often left disconnected in sales organizations. He makes sure that execution is connected to and aligned with strategy. He brings people and functions together to makes sure the whole system works.

Steve challenges assumptions and helps groups find the best solution, despite sacred cows and vested interests. He’s the voice at the table that you need to hear, even though you may not always want to hear.

Steve sticks to the principles and brings us back if we should waiver from these.

Steve’s biggest value is in crossing boundaries and helping to formulate a strategy, going across the organization and bringing people and functions together to perform better. Steve is very strong with groups and people in implementation – solving, focusing, finding higher ways to achieve, coaching, supporting and stretching.