Testimonial from Scott Upston
Primal Health

My wife, Tania and I, started our business in 2015. We have a gym and personal training business with over 500 members in Benalla. The business was going well and so we bought another complementary business in early 2018. I’m a very action-oriented person; I’m ex-Army (21 years) and a former Paralympic coach, and both Tania and I enjoy pushing ourselves to be the best we can be.

We had set goals for 2020 (for our business and our personal life) but we were being pulled from pillar to post. We weren’t 100% sure how to prioritise to get the outcomes we wanted.

Business was performing well but your own skills can only take you so far

We could see that our experiences and skills had evolved the businesses as far as we could take them. But we still wanted to take our businesses to the next level. We realised that your own skill sets can only take you so far. As an athlete – whether that’s a sporting athlete or a business athlete – you can only evolve as much as your playing group. So, if you want to keep excelling, you have to enhance your playing group.

We knew our businesses could be even better, we just needed to add new skills and thinking to our playing group. We started looking into business coaching.

You have to find the right coach for your business

Both our businesses are in regional Victoria so we looked at business coaches and business mentors around our area like Bendigo, Ballarat, Shepparton, and Wangaratta. Look, the other business coaches were ok but none of them were right for where we wanted to take the business. Once we found Tenfold, we understood the importance of partnering with the right coach at a good firm of coaches. Even though Tenfold is in Melbourne and we’re 2 hours away, we could see straight away that they would be worth travelling for. The investment is more, but it’s definitely worth it. And now we’re using Zoom for our coaching, so it’s even better.

We thought we knew what we needed to do – until we got a new perspective from our Tenfold business coach

One of the main areas we thought we wanted advice on was marketing. We didn’t have a strong marketing plan and we thought that was a priority for hitting the growth targets we’d set ourselves. The interesting thing was, once we sat down with Lee and did a deep dive into what we wanted to achieve with the businesses we realised that the marketing plan wasn’t the most important thing. Yes, it’s on the list of what we’re working on but it’s actually not an imperative item. There are other strategies for growing the business that we’re implementing and they are getting immediate results.

That’s one of the things you realise with coaching – you don’t know what you don’t know. We thought we needed one thing but in reality, we discovered there were other things that would actually drive the business forward faster.

Our Tenfold coach gets the best out of us for the best of the business

Like lots of business owners, you tend to have a limited vision of your business because you’re so immersed in it. Having our business coach, Lee at Tenfold, enabled us to look at the business holistically. He made us look up and ahead, and then we can see the bigger picture. You can see what your business is really capable of and how to get there.

From day one, Lee has had our businesses’ best interests at heart. Tania and I are partners in life and crime, and sometimes that can get a bit tricky. Lee’s great at communicating with each of us to get the best out of us so we can give our best to the business.

Tania loves the data, whereas I’m more action-oriented. We used to measure a lot of things in the business but we didn’t really do much with the information. There was too much data. Lee introduced us to the 4 Disciplines of Execution and worked out our lead and lag indicators. Now we measure 4 key metrics of growth. Tania got a really good handle on that, and that directly drove the business.

Business coaching shows us better ways to do the things that matter

Another area of coaching that has added a significant benefit to our business is recruitment. Like a lot (probably most) business owners, we never had a strategy or process for recruiting before. We would basically take anyone who was around and who said they could do the job. We’d hire them and then find out that they couldn’t do it to our standards, or they only wanted to do it their own way, or they didn’t fit our culture. Then we’d have to let them go and start again. It was a waste of time and money, and it was just frustrating.

Our business coach Lee had seen it all before so he knew what to do. He implemented a step-by-step process for recruiting – from getting the job ad right to screening and interviewing and testing. We even do behavioural profile assessments now – they’re so useful. With Lee and Tenfold, it’s like having your own back-of-house support when you need it.

If you want to be the best, you gotta surround yourself with the best

I want to say this about Lee and his nature: he’s confident and there’s a warmth to him but he’s also willing to push back as well. He will definitely challenge us on some things because he’s always putting the business first. We know we can trust him because we know that he really is coming from a position of genuine commitment to our business growth.

In March this year (2020) we were about to PB our KPIs, revenue in, client retention – every benchmark we set and every goal we set, were all due to be hit. Then COVID came.

Without Tenfold and Lee in our corner, we wouldn’t have got through. Lee and Ashley and the team of coaches and business specialists have backed us the whole time.

If you want to be successful in anything you do in life, you gotta have the best team around you. Yes, there’s a financial cost to working with a Tenfold business coach. And I have to say, we had some nervousness about it because we’d never done it before. In hindsight, we should’ve done it a lot earlier.

If you’re a business owner like myself and Tania, people who are willing to learn, I highly recommend business coaching with Tenfold.

Visit Primal Health website: primalhealthclub.com.au

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Lee Dore is part of the award-winning team at Tenfold Business Coaching, led by managing director Ashley Thomson (Coaching Hall of Fame). Lee is professionally qualified with experience as a general manager and commercial experience across a range of industries. His draws on his strong sales background to empower his clients to clarify their goals and achieve them.

Learn about Lee