Insights from an SME Consulting Expert

In this one I had the pleasure of chatting with Dave Parry, the Managing Director at Wellmeadow Ltd, a consultancy that helps businesses that need non-exec support, process transformation or support with lead generation.

Dave and I had a wide ranging discussion, looking at how small businesses set their vision and strategies, how they live up to those and ensure the entire organisation stays on track. 

We looked at some of the specific challenges of hybrid working, with Dave’s experience of chairing thousands of Board Meetings providing interesting insight to the In Office vs. Remote discussion many of us are having. 

Dave then shares some excellent rules around hosting an effective meeting as well as a well thought through marketing workflow that they support their clients with at Wellmeadow.

If you are looking for clarity around Operations, Corporate Governance and Marketing, Dave’s clear thinking and straightforward approach to business is refreshing and this episode is a must for you.

Business Book Bonus: 
Harvard Business Review  -  https://hbr.org/
Management Today  - https://www.managementtoday.co.uk/ 
SME Growth Podcast - https://www.smegrowthpodcast.com/

Transcript

Adam (00:01.826)

So today I'm here with Dave Parry, who is the Managing Director of Wellmeadow Limited, a consultancy that helps businesses that need non -exec support, support with lead generation, or process transformation through HubSpot. Dave, welcome to the Fractional CFO Show. How are you doing?

Dave (00:18.574)

Thank you very much Adam, thanks for inviting me. Yes I'm doing very well, thank you. I hope you're all doing well too.

Adam (00:23.65)

I'm doing very well, thanks for being here. And today I'm excited to be talking with Dave about some insights from a small medium sized entity consulting expert, which I think we can safely say you are Dave with your experience. So with that in mind, perhaps could you give us a bit of an overview of your career so far?

Dave (00:44.142)

How long have you got on that? Yeah, and I guess the story I've got is perhaps more common these days, you know, the idea of a portfolio career where you don't just do one thing.

when you leave school or university and stick to it. So I'm definitely very much embedded in the second of my two careers. The first being after a degree in engineering, went into engineering management and factory management, mainly in the automotive industry. So I spent 15 years running factories from 70 people up to 350 people. And cut my teeth, if you like, as to what it's like working for large group companies, a subsidiary of a large group company, American companies, French companies, lots of different cultures. Sat through lots of senior level board meetings, certainly, as I wrote.

through the ranks and formed views about how these were working and was even lucky or unlucky enough to work in a firm with a fairly major consulting exercise that went on, lots of money spent on big city consultants, so I got to see what that was like on the receiving end. Moved around the country, around the world a bit and then when I finally decided to review where my career was going I dabbled with the idea of going into something more consulting related.

partially informed by the fact that lots of my peer group from earlier on, my university peer group, had done that from the start. And I'd always resisted. I said, I didn't want to do that. I wanted to go out and learn what it's like to really run a business yourself, even if it's for a big multinational. But at that time, I gave it a go. I found someone who was setting up a new practice. I went into business with him, and that was back in 2004.

So 20 years on now, I've been doing this. It's definitely, as I say, well embedded in the second version of my career. And that started out more general consulting stuff, but quickly I realized that the only way you can get stuff changed if you can get an influencer board level. So our firm definitely evolved into being something that helped board meetings, owners and managers to run that top level lever that they have of setting direction and driving progress.

Adam (02:38.434)

Excellent, excellent loads there and yeah, really varied career and I can see, see how you've ended up, where you've ended up. And with that in mind, I'd love to start to get your view, particularly for our audience, so typically small business owners, from your experience helping businesses to set their vision, set their objectives, can you discuss high level sort of the process that how you recommend companies define their visions and objectives?

particularly with small businesses in mind.

Dave (03:10.158)

Yeah, absolutely. And this is very much advice for the smaller business, because I know that larger companies, more established corporates and PLCs will definitely have a different way of doing this. But I've tried everything with SMEs from the away day in the hotel lasting two or three days through to just an afternoon at the local golf club's meeting room or something in the boardroom and involving a range of the top team from a team of eight to 10 people, all inputs right down to the narrow. And over the years of doing it, I've stuck true really, and I'm firmer of the belief now,

than ever I've been, that the vision of the company has to come from the leader. And you can't have four, five, ten leaders. So when an owner asks me to call together a group and facilitate a vision strategy sort of day, then I play that back to them. I say, look, where do you want this to go? This isn't, I know you want to be consultative, but we can't have a democracy on where everybody wants to go because you'll have lots of different views and you have winners and losers. You have to have someone at the beginning saying, this is

where we're trying to get to. And I was given a piece of advice very early on in my career, which was a bit glib, if you like, a bit tongue -in -cheek, but it said that a leader only has two things to do, create a vision and build a team. And that's all you have to do. So I played that back a few times, eliciting wry smiles from various clients that I've worked with. But if you as the leader haven't got a clear vision about where you are taking that organization, then you can't delegate that. You have to lead from the front.

Adam (04:39.81)

Yeah, absolutely. I think that's great advice. And, you know, in terms of particularly in smaller businesses where the owner starts to build that team and starts to sort of grow the business, they can often lose sight of that and feel like they have to get involved in every area. And so keeping it quite defined as, you know, team and vision, that's a very sort of nice way of looking at it. I like that. And it'd be great to...

Dave (05:04.014)

Yeah, I think so. Sorry, I was just going to say, bring your money to smaller firms, the owner or manager doesn't have the luxury of a load of Harvard MBAs around the table. You've got people that have grown up through the business, they may be family members, they have all sorts of different skill sets, but they're not necessarily been recruited for their strategic capabilities. So you have to take on that mantle.

Adam (05:24.322)

Yeah, absolutely. And family members you mentioned, there's a whole can of worms there, aren't there, in terms of trying to define a vision when surrounded by your family who obviously all know best, right?

Dave (05:35.374)

Exactly, yeah, there can be some conflicts there between your interest in looking after your family and friends, your natural empathy and your desire to drive the business forward.

Adam (05:45.506)

great. Perhaps do you have any examples that you could share where your sort of vision setting strategies have had a real impact on business growth?

Dave (05:55.598)

Yeah, I think definitely the one that I would bring to mind first is for a seasonal business that we work with. They have always suffered, if you like, or had the luxury of a very busy summer. They work in the education sector, so they get a lot of their business that has to tie into when the universities in particular haven't got students around. So there's a relatively small window over the summer when major works can be done, which means that really for a period of about three months of the year, you get about half your turnover. And that's really tricky to do.

deal with. So how do you then cope with the fact that you need those skills retained ready for next summer so you can't just lay people off when you don't need them and re -recruit, especially if you're in a manufacturing business with those sort of deep -seated skills, and you want to be able to manage your cash flow through the period. So we've, through numerous vision sessions, driven this objective of trying to find a different sector to move into, which was, if not counter -cyclical, at least would smooth that out a bit. And we've dabbled with going to the southern hemisphere,

because their university is also breaking the summer but they've got a different summer so that was one idea, or moving into different segments within education. And the most recent one which is starting now to get some traction but there's a whole new story about this which is to go into a different sector entirely and that's healthcare. And they've moved very successfully, probably still in the early stages but they've been doing it for two or three years now, moving into the healthcare sector.

And that's interesting on a number of fronts because you realize that didn't come up as the first idea. You have to try lots of different things. And there's probably lots of learnings there. If you've ever read the book, Where to Play and How to Win, or those sort of strategy advice things, you're not just going to sit in a room and come up with a brilliant idea that works straight away. You've got to try different things, but you've got to fail fast. You've got to stop doing the ones that aren't working and don't devote too much time to them. But having come across one, you then realize that that's not going to be a direct replica of the sector you know.

So not only will you not have the personal contacts and the reputations and all of that, but the way of selling and the dynamics and the politics is very different. You've got to learn a whole new skill set if you're going to move into a new sector. And certainly going into some monolithic public sector organization like the health service, that is one hell of a challenge. And it would surprise you to know that there's lots of existing players that don't welcome the idea of no entrance.

Dave (08:12.078)

So, that's a very interesting one. And we haven't mentioned so far, but you came on our podcast the other week and I've got another episode that I'm recording for our podcast tomorrow. And it's from the managing director of that exact company. So I'll be looking forward to finding out a little bit more of the juicy details of quite how difficult that's been trying to break into an entirely new sector.

Adam (08:33.122)

I look forward to listening to that and yes, I think that the challenges I guess that you face when trying to shift to a new sector or a new region are multiple and are there some sort of common challenges that you see that businesses face in terms of setting and sticking?

to objectives linked to that new vision because obviously it's very different and that's a whole other sort of area of challenge is setting and forming those objectives for a new sector. Any sort of common challenges there?

Dave (09:06.382)

Yeah, very clearly. And if you go back to what is the definition of a strategy, it's really to understand that we can all make decisions. OK, so if you're making a deliberate strategy, it's the decisions you take to either do new things or to stop doing things that you're doing. That's in your control. You could have a more reactive strategy where you follow opportunities. That can work as well. You know, a company comes up for sale that just happens to be right in your sweet spot, and you buy them, and away and off you go. And then after the event, you obviously dress that up as if you intended it all along. But you know, it was a good strategy.

It's an accidental opportunity. But if you're talking here about deliberate strategy, it's a series of decisions. But making the decision is only a small fraction of it. You've got to back it up with resource. You've got to be clearly communicating that's what you're going to do and make sure that the people that need to deliver it have got the resources to be able to do so. Otherwise, it's just wishful thinking, right? You can have a, what is it, a vision without a plan is just a dream, you know, that old quote. And that's the trap that you're in the risk of falling into. So once you've decided where you want to go,

Be very honest with yourself. How much effort is that going to take? And have we got either the spare resource from internal people to do that? Do we need to rejig the positions on the board or even take on outside help? Maybe you get an interim to drive that part of the strategy or perhaps you do buy another company or at least recruit somebody with the expertise. But do something deliberate about it. Just having the strategy away day, writing a load of objectives down on the flip chart, putting them in the drawer and going back to the day job for another year isn't really going to change anything.

Adam (10:37.026)

Yeah, that was actually what I wanted to ask because obviously you can often have those business objectives be, you know, a word on a page, a word on a website, but it's about bringing them to life. And as you said about communicating with the team and making sure that the resources are available. So how do companies in your experience best make sure that every team member understands and contributes to those new business goals?

Dave (11:02.968)

It has to start from the top. So this is where I mentioned earlier in my background, my frustrations when I first started seeing small companies work is this lack of a properly structured board meeting. And I don't want people to get the wrong idea of that and say that this is all about lawyers. It's far from it. We don't have any lawyers present at all. But when I go into companies and they say they have board meetings at all, then they tend to be very relaxed affairs, sometimes even in the pub. And it's people who say, well, we talk to each other every day anyway. Why do we need a formal meeting? Well, the idea of a monthly formal meeting is that you do focus,

much more a high level about how the business is doing but still on a reasonably short timeframe.

So it's useful because it makes you look again at the accounts having taken a step back or a monthly report from operations or sales or marketing and health and safety and so on. So there's definitely a role for that. Now the back end of that board meeting, it's very good to refer to all the strategic objectives to remind all the directors present that that's what we've all signed up for. And there's an MD that I know that talks to his team about the percentage of their time that he would expect them to spend on either of the directors,

strategic role, the management part of their role, and the doing part of their role. And we have to accept that in small companies, even directors or even owners end up spending a lot of their time doing, right? It's a small team. So the view would be maybe rough spit, and you can come up with your own exact numbers, but maybe 50 % of your time is doing. That's just the nature of a small company. And 30 % to 40 % may be the managing bit.

but you still need a slug at the top, which is the strategic bit, the director bit. And even if that's only 10%, that's half a day a week, and it's maybe more typically should be 20%.

Dave (12:43.054)

If you were to think about that on a pie chart, where would you say a director should be spending their time? Well, 20 % is a day a week. Then ask in the board meeting, which day this week did you spend on these objectives? And you know what the answer is going to be. Well, none. Maybe a couple of weeks ago, I had a meeting on it for an hour, or I've sent an email, I've got a quote, or whatever it is they've done. So the challenge is really trying to align.

Right at the board level, if you haven't got that right, then there's no point berating or hoping for better further down the organisation where people are suddenly going to spring into life and implement your own strategic objectives for you. It's got to come from that level. And that's usually where it breaks down. It's not that the people further down. People are often hungry to achieve these objectives, especially if they've been communicated well and described in a very attractive manner. The frustration from the middle managers and below is upwards.

because the directors are just trying to carry on doing more of what they've always done without creating the room to drive the change. So I would say certainly think about, without having heard my little story there, if you were asked to put a pie chart down of how you split your time between directors duties, management duties, and doing duties, you're not going to put zero down for the strategy directory bit. And it's probably going to be at least 10%, which is half of their week. And then ask yourself, are you spending half of their week delivering your strategic objectives?

Adam (14:01.634)

That's great. Really tangible example there. And how important do you find it is to set smart goals, smart objectives, and any advice about getting those aligned with the business objectives so the directors, the employees know specifically what they're aiming for?

Dave (14:19.694)

I'm not going to come on here and unwind decades of received wisdom about smart objectives and for being specific and measurable and all that sort of stuff. Clearly, that is important, especially if you're tying compensation packages to it or pay appraisals and personal reviews. Of course, that's clearer. But I always come back to that point I said at the beginning about what the leader needs to have with this very clear vision. If you describe that vividly enough and it's attractive enough and people want to get there,

then you don't necessarily have to have it completely measurable, it depends what degree we're talking about. If you look at Pepsi's vision to kill Coke, it's quite clear. You don't have to really go into a lot of smart definitions. Everybody knows what they want. Ryanair's objective, fill every seat.

you know, back on the Pepsi idea, Iron Brew was to be the third largest soft drinks manufacturer in the world, because they know they're never going to overtake Coke and Pepsi. You know, these sorts of ideas, Nike make every person an athlete. I know they come across as a bit glib, but once you've got that firmly embedded in everybody's mind, that's what we're trying to achieve. Breaking it down and cascading it to the next level of fundamental implementable strategic objectives, that's where the smart bit comes in, potentially. But even then, having a very compelling...

vivid description of it is really what drives people forward if you really want to do it. Measure your progress there by having a measure of course, but don't just have measures for the sake of it. There's a danger almost of the measures taking over and people forgetting what it was that the measure was there to try and measure the progress towards. They end up managing the measure rather than achieving the original objective.

Adam (15:55.17)

Yeah, no, absolutely. I think that the clarity of vision, as you say, is critical. Changing tack slightly, you know, one of the many challenges that business owners have today is managing external and internal team members with hybrid working, sort of the done thing these days. I'd love to hear your view on some of the different approaches and considerations that you've had to take to team building and leadership development.

when you have team members in the office versus remote.

Dave (16:28.43)

Well, that's a really hot topic at the moment, isn't it? And I must admit, I'm having that discussion in many of the board meetings. I'm having this new challenge, in a way, for those of us that have been used to being in office all of our lives. Suddenly, in the last three years, really, we've been confronted with a new reality. And a whole generation of employees that are coming through with different expectations about that. The genie's out of the bottle. And we've realized that in many circumstances, working remotely is very effective. And I'll tell you in a moment an anecdote about that in a meeting I was in.

only yesterday, a board meeting with a very distributed team. But my general thought on team building and all of that is that it is useful to have these away days that companies do. And sometimes they go and do some sort of outbound type thing and climb poles and that sort of thing.

I'm not saying that that is what really drives a team. I think they're fun and I think you need to have a sort of social fun element to the side of the team. But don't think that by going for a once a year away day where you go and climb a hill or whatever, that that's gonna suddenly build your team. It's much more fundamental and I think we all know that. You know, probably teaching granary suck eggs on that one to all of your listeners. They know that team building is done in lots of small incremental steps throughout the year. We understand the codependency, the need to feedback and work with you.

with each other constructively and all that sort of thing. So that comes whether or not you've gone and learned to fall backwards into the arms of your colleagues or solve some clever spaghetti -based challenge that you've been set by an instructor. They're fun, and I think there's an element to it. In our company, we do do an away day, for sure, but it's not because we expect it to suddenly change the dynamic of our team. It's just partially a reward for what we've done for the year, partially just to get out and do something else. But throughout the year, we're trying as best we can to have little micro -social events.

whether it be a Friday, pop down the pub on the way home or go out for a brunch one day midweek for those that can't stay after work and try and be inclusive about it. So I'm a big fan of all of the outside stuff, but team building comes from within as well and understanding how we each contribute to the result, celebrate successes and all that. But back to your point about this conflict, maybe it is, or at least a new way of working that we've all got to get used to, of remote or not. And the anecdote I said I would come back to. The company I was dealing with yesterday,

Dave (18:45.024)

is a Norwegian company based in Oslo. I've been working with them for a little while, fantastic product. And their MD is based in Lisbon. Their marketing director is based in Winnipeg in Canada. Their sales director, if you like, is based in Oslo. Their engineering and manufacturing is based in Poland. And they've just taken on a new senior sales manager who's based in Slovakia.

and I helped them with running their board meetings from the UK. So we're all over the place. And one of the shareholders turned up yesterday at the board meeting, who's interested in the business, and he was asking this exact question. How are you doing so well, given that you've hardly ever meet each other? And in fact, the sales manager they've just taken on in Slovakia told a story that in his previous company, where he worked for two or three years, he didn't meet a single person face to face. And he was very successful.

And this is this whole new world that is still a little bit alien to me, I have to accept. In our company, I still have a preference for an office first way of working. I like the fact that when we're in the office, we spar off each other, creativity happens, you pick up on chance conversations. And I'm very worried about the fate of younger people coming into the workforce.

if they're not around people all day long, just to pick up on how work is done and how does the politics work and picking up learning points by accident just because you happen to be around and over here. I don't think we're good yet at structuring all of what we do well enough to be able to cope with the Zoom meeting or Teams meeting and replace that. Now maybe the next generation coming through will be much better at that than we are because they're more natively familiar with it and we're not. So maybe the future is brighter.

Adam (19:54.114)

Mm -hmm.

Dave (20:22.734)

and some forward thinking companies now, especially those with young leaders, are doing very well at it. But for those of us that have got a five or six at the beginning of our age or even more, I think it's a little bit more of a challenge to adapt. But you have to accept that that's the way we're going and find a way.

Adam (20:39.298)

Yeah, absolutely. That is very interesting. Your Norwegian example and the shareholders' response to that is fascinating. And do you find that the dynamics change when you have some people in the same room and some remote? So that's a conflict I've often found where you've got a few people within a meeting room and then a number of other people remote. Do you have that situation? Have you had it? And how have you found that?

Dave (21:08.014)

Yeah, totally reflecting your experience really and I hate the hybrid meeting. I would rather have all of us disappear to our office in the same building and join online if necessary if there are one or a number of people that can't join in person and aren't going to be joining remotely. This idea of the hybrid meeting where most of the people are in the room and one, two or three are remotely, they're horrible dynamics to run. And because I chair most of the meetings that I'm in, most of them are board meetings where I'm facilitating the meeting and trying to...

Challenge thought and all that sort of thing. Being able to read the body language of those that are remote, understand when they want to come in or see even that subtle raise of an eyebrow or flinch or you know everyone has a tell. If you're good at running those meetings you've got to be able to bring in people with non -verbalised opinions because you can sense that they're ready to say something, they've got something to say. Very, very hard to do when some people are on the screen but your attention is really to the people in the room.

So I'm not a big fan of the hybrid meeting. I think technology will help us on this eventually. There are some great films where in fiction they've managed to indicate how it might work, where you've got almost avatars or holograms around the table. And tech may well get there. We even played with that a few years ago, putting iPads on chairs around the screen so that each iPad had a different person on it. And that did not change the dynamic. It was an amazing experience, actually. Just quite faffy to set up, as you can imagine, getting the audio right. But it was a good insight as to how when the

the tech catches up, that may well work very well. But I would say my preference is always for face -to -face, especially for important meetings where you're challenging opinions and you're making big decisions. That's not necessarily the case for the weekly 10 minute Monday morning check -in, is it the team know what they're doing type meeting, I agree. But for the big meetings face -to -face, and if we can't do that, then I'd rather have all online.

even if you're in the same building, to accommodate those that are coming in externally. But it's still, for me, a very poor second best for those most important meetings where really difficult stuff is discussed. But let's distinguish quite clearly between that type of meeting and your more common progress update, communication, let's get together and have a chat type meeting. That works much better over Teams or Zoom.

Adam (23:20.738)

Yeah, absolutely. Interesting. And can you tell me, I mean, you've talked a bit about your chairing of board meetings. I'd love to hear some tips from a very experienced meeting chair such as yourself around how to keep those meetings focused, how to keep them on track and moving in the right direction. Because we've all been in meetings which have veered off and you leave the meeting at the end going, what the hell was that? Why did we just waste an hour of our life? So how do you keep them focused and on track?

Dave (23:49.166)

Well, I would say this, wouldn't I? But you've got to have a good chair, a facilitator, whatever you want to call them. Even meetings without an agenda, which is number two point, you've got to have an agenda, right? But even a meeting without an agenda can run reasonably well if it's got a good chair slash facilitator. So it's got to be driven. Someone's got to own the meeting and regard the meeting as a process. It's not let's get together and see how it goes. That's a chat, right? You do that in the pub. If we're really trying to get some sort of outcome from it, whether it be a decision or an agreement or just surfacing an issue and discussing it.

then you need someone to think about how is this discussion going. And like you say, discussions will go off on tributaries and it's up to the chairman to decide is this a useful diversion? Is this going to add to our outcome? Or maybe even do we now change the whole purpose of the meeting because that is so important? Or to bring it back on track and say, can we park that and come back to it?

So number one, definitely have a strong chairman. If you haven't got a strong chairman, take on that role. Work out what you need to do to drive the process of the meeting. You don't just have random chats. Have the good agenda. Make sure your agenda gets the boring bits out of the way to start with when the energy levels are still reasonably high and you're good at it. If you put them at the end, they'll never get done. So from a board meeting point of view, make sure you're covered off the basics of your company's risk register and your conflicts of interests.

and all the sorts of things that you might have to do, your policy updates and so on. Get all that out of the way in more than 10, 15 minutes, just get that done. And then spend the bulk of the meeting doing the reports and properly engage with people as to why are you telling us here? Are we just telling bedtime stories, which is one of our favorite phrases? If all you're going to do is prepare a board report and then read it out to us, that's just telling bedtime stories. I can read that myself. Thank you very much. Extract from it for me, what is the meaning? What have you interpreted from what you're telling us that now as a business we have to do?

to consider? Are we flying straight and level towards our destination, in which case, minor tuning here, but let's not discuss it too long, move on somewhere else? Are we pointing in the wrong direction entirely, or have we just gone into a nosedive or running out of fuel? Tell us big picture stuff. Just give us the headline. And I try and get every department to start their board report with a tweet in 140 characters. Just tell me how the last month's gone. I know you're not limited to 140 characters anymore, and what's a tweet and all that. But the...

Dave (26:03.054)

concept, write the headline. Imagine you're writing the news story of your department for the month. What's the headline? And you don't have 500 words in the headline. And then beneath that, just very succinctly tell me what's happened, what's going to happen next, and what do we now need to discuss as a board? Have we got any decisions to take? Have we got something going wrong that you're looking for input on or shoulder to cry on or just different perspectives? Or are you just saying, no, all fine, straight and level, nothing to see here, move on? So be very clear about that.

And then the second bit, sorry second, I think I'm up to third now, if not fourth, is a technique that I've always employed. I never see it done anywhere else, and I've tried it and I think I know why. But I take the minutes myself while I'm during the meeting. Now that is a particular skill I appreciate not everybody has. You've got to be able to touch type for a start without looking at the screen. And you've got to be able to think what you're going to say next while typing what someone else just said. So not everybody's got that skill, but anyway, that's something else.

But the key thing about it is to project on the screen what you're typing. Now I've done this to typists who are proud 120 -year -old typists, and they fall apart. And it's something you've just got to get used to. But the idea of the team realizing that the minutes of that meeting will be the only thing that exists tangibly.

when you walk out that room. Some of you will have memories and as we all know, as we get older, they have a half life, which is getting shorter by the year and by the pint consumed. So the only thing that really matters afterwards, apart from your memories of it and the camaraderie and the social interaction in the meeting is those minutes. Hopefully you'll never have to read them again because if you see them being written,

They go in in a very different way to if you just listen to something. For a start, you hear my interpretation of what you've just said, because I've just typed what I think you've just said. Secondly, you have the immediate opportunity to challenge it and correct it and change it, from something as trivial as a spelling mistake of a person or a company's name that I'm not familiar with, or even the tenet of what I've just written. And perhaps more importantly, where there's been an implied action that either I have or haven't picked up. So what are we going to do about that, then? What's your opinion on that?

Adam (27:43.266)

Yeah.

Dave (28:07.598)

So we definitely don't try and write minutes that are crazy transcripts, you know, court recorder type stenographer stuff. This is definitely a summary of the salient points and where the decisions need to be taken, what actions are, but project them on the screen. So I think just winding back over the last few bits, definitely have a strong chair of the meeting, definitely have an agenda, and definitely take minutes as you go along and project them on the screen. The beauty of that is you can then publish the minutes at the end, because everyone's already reviewed them, and you don't have to...

Adam (28:18.53)

Mm -hmm.

Adam (28:23.522)

Yep.

Adam (28:41.666)

Excellent, excellent. And with the, so just a couple of questions with the minutes, you share them immediately after the meeting or do you refine them, edit them and then share them a little bit further out? Great.

Dave (28:50.254)

No, absolutely instantly. Before everybody stood up, their mobile phones were pinging because the emails had just arrived. I used some software that we had written for us commercially, which we call Magic Minutes, if I can put a quick plug in for that. But it suits us and several people use that around the world, hundreds of people.

I've got into the habit of doing this much more formal preparation for a meeting, run the meeting, take the minutes online, click the button with the next meeting date already agreed in it, and then a PDF gets sent to everybody with the results of that meeting, including separate emails with all the actions that they've agreed to and so on. We had to develop that because we chaired two or three hundred board meetings a year, we've done thousands of them. We needed a way of automating that part of the process, but it is so effective. I cannot emphasise enough, especially if you run lots of meetings.

You've got to make sure that's not an overhead. That's not a task you're left with to then write up your scribbled handwritten notes, check whether I got that down right, go and ask someone else, have somebody else say, well, I didn't want to say it like that. Get all out of the way. You're in the meeting to have the meeting. That's where the minutes come from. The minutes are the output of the meeting, and they should be circulated before you stood up. And that's the problem with you invite someone else in whose only job is to take the minutes.

rather than having someone who understands in depth the subject matter as well as some of the governance stuff, you've got to make sure you're written. So there's certainly a role for having one of you who is an active participant in the meeting taking the minutes, but project them on the screen and send them at the end.

Adam (30:15.53)

Excellent. I think that's a very worthwhile plug and happy to promote that because that sounds like a very useful bit of kit. And then the other question I had was just about, you mentioned that you don't do a transcript or you don't record. Have you considered the sort of voice recording or recording of the meeting and then using that as a kind of record along with the minutes or is that not something that works in your experience?

Dave (30:36.622)

Not the transcript. That's been around for a couple of years, as you know, and all of the online tools like Teams and Zoom provides a transcript record and transcript functionality. That's not really that useful. Some companies or certainly public sector organizations like the idea of having a verbatim record of who said what. I don't think they ever actually refer back to it, but it's kind of a safety blanket thing. They like to think that if ever they're challenged on something, they can go back. But I don't hear of examples where it's actually been used in practice. What has changed more recently is with the advent of more available artificial intelligence.

intelligence using these large language models there they're able to summarize a transcript much more usefully now any one of the the teams in zoom recorders can do that for you if you use something like otter which is a commercial product which transcribes that does a good AI summary but I'm going to plug put a plug in here for a software that we use called fathom which integrates with zoom and teams and it takes the recording and does the transcription and produces a very good AI summary which it can then automatically send out to everybody now if I

If I wasn't doing a formal board meeting, I'd be more inclined to almost rely on what it comes up with. It's getting to the point now where it is so good at summarizing the key points and especially the key actions that have been agreed in that AI summary that the minutes are almost, for most meetings, becoming unnecessary. They'll do. And of course, they can refer back to the exact transcript and video recording of it if you wanted to flesh out, if you got some words wrong or whatever. So they're getting much better, even to the point where you can say, what type of meeting is this?

and it will come up with its AI summary in that style. So if it's a one -to -one meeting or a review meeting or a sales demo, you can pick all those options. So that works very well. So I'm getting closer to it. But even yesterday, I sent out that exact AI summary after I'd sent my minutes. And everybody agreed it's amazing how well they're coming on. But for a board meeting, you really need to have the human interaction at this stage still writing it out. But I guess that's because AI hasn't been trained on how I write my minutes. So I'm never going to be quite happy with them.

Adam (32:35.714)

You've got to build that large language model of all your data. I'm sure that's coming.

Excellent. Well, just shifting tack slightly. I know that you at Wellmerdo have expertise in digital marketing and inbound marketing techniques. Can you talk me through sort of high level a little bit how it works and what it is you do?

Dave (32:57.806)

Yeah, now this came about through the fact that whenever we interact with our companies at the board level, there are always some needs they have between board meetings, which are nothing to do with the action of reviewing the strategy and driving progress and reviewing reports. There are common problems everywhere you go. You might think of management reporting, for example, in your world of CFO. The quality of some management reports are very poor, so we've helped with that from time to time. Recruitment is another common problem that no matter what business you're in, people are people, and we have similar problems, and we've helped with that in the past.

Another one that we've helped with in the past is trying to convert spreadsheets, the plethora of spreadsheets, which the bane of any company's life as it grows, into something more formalised, databases and that sort of thing. But on our journey of finding these other things to help with, the one that has always come up top and has stuck is lead generation. And nearly every company I speak to is confident in their ability to sell because they're passionate about their product, they know lots about it, they've been selling it for years, get to one of their salesmen on a roll and they're off.

but they'll always bemoan the fact that they haven't got enough people to sell to. And they don't regard their marketing department properly as a lead generation department. And I'm going to be rude here to several marketing departments, but not intentionally about the people within them, but they can be regarded as the colouring in department. So they'll do the website, they'll do some nice logos and brochures, and they'll produce some collateral, maybe look after the social. But they're not being properly targeted on how many leads do they bring in. And so that's the discipline that we bring to lots of our companies.

and we treat the service that we can provide, which has become now an increasing sort of offshoot of what we do as part of our board and governance and business support and advice stuff, is around this lead generation version of digital marketing. So if it isn't working, stop doing it and find other things to do, but focus it always on the time of lead gen. So you mentioned inbound there, which is a phrase made.

more famous by HubSpot, who's the famous sort of one of the two big CRM systems out there alongside Salesforce. More people have heard of Salesforce, but HubSpot has come up on the rails very quickly with a couple hundred thousand companies already that use their software. We're a partner of theirs. We went down that route having decided that we like what they do. And their mantra is around this concept of inbound marketing, that you've got to produce content, whether it be on your website, on your blogs, in your social feeds, podcasts, that we're talking about webinars, whatever your output is, it's got to be useful and interesting almost to be

Dave (35:17.76)

10 times better than whatever else is out there at the moment. And if you haven't got expertise that you feel you can contribute something that's 10 times better than anything else, then you're in the wrong game.

or you're an auto -run. You've got to have enough confidence in something that you can produce content that's 10 times better than what's already out there. And when you do it, structure in a very particular way so that people will not only find it, but be taken gently through a nurturing process so that when they have a need, then they'll contact you and you can initiate an opportunity and try and sell to them.

Don't sell to them too soon. So imagine it like you're setting out a breadcrumb trail or a sweetie trail in Hansel and Gretel terms. You've got to give lots of little sweets away, lots of little bits of benefit, whether it be tips and tricks and e -books and downloads and check sheets and fact sheets and white papers. They all need to be part of the journey. And you really want to encourage your community, your visitors to your website, the strangers that you need to attract. Get them to come in and consume those things. For those that are high enough value, ask for an email address in return.

but don't sell to people when they give you their email address.

Continue to use them in the nurturing workflows, but now you can add email as well as just expecting them to respond to a social or an SEO find on your website. And continue to give that sort of value. And when that person is ready, when they've moved on their buyer's journey from the awareness stage, they're coming through the consideration stage, and they're now coming to the decision stage, that's when they will do something that you will spot. They'll go to a certain page on the website, they'll ask for a meeting, they'll click on a different link, they'll open a different part of the email, whatever it may be. And then that's the moment when you can

Dave (36:49.504)

where you can declare them as a potential opportunity. You call them a marketing qualified lead, hand them over to your sales team, and that's when they do their magic during a discovery call. Which they may still qualify somebody out, fail fast, you know, that's the mantra. But that's the order of things how they happen. So yeah, that's what we've got ourselves all into. And as you can tell from that, we've thought a lot about it.

Adam (37:10.402)

Yeah, no, absolutely a real clear workflow. They're very easy to understand. And do you find that, you know, I know, I believe and correct me if I'm wrong, the HubSpot is more designed for slightly smaller organizations and Salesforce perhaps slightly larger. And with the sort of our audience in mind here being slightly smaller, are there, are there sort of any techniques that you've uncovered that are particularly good at helping the smaller organizations differentiate themselves from those larger?

competitors who might have a larger marketing budget or larger sort of resource to be able to really hone in on.

Dave (37:45.23)

Okay, two questions in one there. Yeah, and the first one is even though HubSpot would deny it, I think you're right. The footprint they both have is as you described, Salesforce is your PLCs and your big companies. Nobody got fired by buying IBM type of product and a lot of salesmen coming out of larger organizations will recognize Salesforce as being the tool of the trade. HubSpot definitely has a bigger footprint in SMEs, partially because it has a very affordable entry level. In fact, the free version is usable as just a CRM if you didn't want to connect it to too much market.

marketing stuff or do anything clever with it, but you want to at least have a database in a browser environment rather than in sales people's phones and in their emails and in their heads, then its free version works well, or its 20 quid a month version works even slightly better. So it's because they've aimed at that smaller market, ideal for the SME, you can self -serve for these smaller ones. You don't even need to pay for onboarding. Salesforce, on the other hand, it's probably similar expense when you get to the bigger companies, but you've got 30 ,000 pound onboarding fees and depending on your

shape it. You can spend money on all sorts. But yeah, certainly HubSpot has designed to be an entry level to mid level, but as they're now developing it, they would very much put the message out that they're scalable and they will grow. You can use HubSpot as your business grows and add more to it. And one thing I would say about it is their development team must be absolutely huge because we get two or three product updates a day and the amount of beta's coming out to play on. So they are really moving places with it. So it can do a lot more than you think. So that's the first question I think you asked. Where do the

the two fit in and if anybody hasn't played with it, give it a go, you can give the free version a go or give us a ring and we'll talk you through it. So that's one. But the second one is what can smaller companies do that bigger companies can't?

I'm not saying the bigger companies can't, but they tend not to do so well, is this sort of thing. This sort of engagement, very much face to face. This podcast style chat explaining, maybe a webinar version and they are different. But nevertheless, being just honest about stuff, being genuine, being you personally, the problem with a big organization is that even if we got a very highly polished presenter to talk the company line, you know that if you contact that company, you're not going to be dealing with that person. They might even be an actor. There's no genuineness. It's just,

Adam (39:53.538)

Yeah. Yeah.

Dave (39:55.264)

just a big monolithic organisation that may be very good, probably is very good. But when you're a small company, you can project personally the people that you will be dealing with in a much more authentic way. So if somebody were to ring up your company, having seen you on this podcast, they're going to do with you. And similarly with me, you know, I may have a team of people out there, but I'm the person that they will contact and we'll have a chat.

They can refer to things that they've heard me personally say on podcasts or on webinars or read my writings or see what I've said on LinkedIn. So I think that's where smaller companies need to stop beating themselves up that they're not as big as X, Y or Z around the corner. They've got to play to the strengths of being small. And that's mainly about being genuine. It's you, it's your expertise.

Adam (40:38.594)

Yeah, no brilliant advice there. Lots of food for thought. We could carry on all day, honestly, Dave, this has been great. But unfortunately, we need to wrap things up. And so move on to our final section, which I call our business book bonus section, which is where we ask our guests to provide us with a recommendation for the audience of a business book or some other type of business content that's really helped.

you during your business career and you'd like to recommend. So what would you be able to recommend for our audience Dave?

Dave (41:08.782)

Well, I suppose I've got a bit of a view about business books, which may be shared by others, which quite often in 300 or 400 pages, there's one or two nuggets of information within it surrounded by an awful lot of padding to turn it into a book because it's considered to be more of a commercial venture than an exercise in business education. So I tend to be a bit journalist about lots and lots of business books.

And I could just list off all the ones that all of your other guests would have listed before, you know, from Seven Habits to Good Stratstity, Bad Stratstity or Built to Sell, you know, Good to Great. All these things are great. They're good. Within them, there are some great nuggets. But I would say if your listeners had time to spend on developing themselves professionally and getting more information, then subscribe to something like the Harvard Business Review.

some high -end management thinking periodical, so that every couple of months you get triggered to think about some other stuff. And we've talked today about the challenges of hybrid working, and they'll have whole articles on that, backed by research. And you don't have to take it verbatim, as that's been the gospel answer, but it will trigger debate within the senior leaders in your organization. And because it's periodical, it comes and it reminds you again, a book, you'll buy it, you'll flick through it, you maybe even read the book somewhere, you put it on the shelf and you forget it.

A periodical will keep reminding you that there's more stuff you can do. And the equivalent of that, if you don't have time to read or you're not into your audiobooks, is podcasts. I would say as much as a book can be good for you, find a few podcasts, cycle around them, listen to people that have got interesting stuff to say. You know, I'm not going to give Steve Bartlett even more money on top of his millions, but he's got 7 million people listening to whichever chief exec he invites on every week and an amazing machine behind that to promote it even more. Your podcast, every time you put a guest out, you're bringing more

expertise to your audience. We're doing the same every week when we talk about our expertise or that of our guests. So find the ones you like and listen in when you're driving in the car or doing the dog walks. I've been able to plug for podcasts, but aside of that, I would say periodical, Harvard Business Review, maybe Management Today or whatever your favorite is. And sure, make sure you've read all the basic business books and pick up anything new. But I don't think they do as good a job as periodicals and podcasts.

Adam (43:18.53)

Yeah, no, I absolutely agree with that. That's great. And before we wrap up, anything that you would like to mention before we wrap up that we haven't covered, where can people find you if nothing else?

Dave (43:29.23)

Yeah, well, our company is WellMEDO, W -E -L -L -M -E -A -D -O -W, WellMEDO .co .uk. We're based up in Shropshire in the Midlands, and we do all the things you talked about. But if people are interested in the podcast, then we've put that on a separate website, which is now called the SMEgrowthpodcast .com. That's without the SMEgrowthpodcast .com.

And they can find us on that, as well as on all the various different channels that you've got. And it may be interesting if people are wanting to find out a bit more about, for example, the starter version of HubSpot or some of the things we've talked about, then look up our webinars. Come to the website and have a look at the webinars we've got, which you can download on demand. You can look at the recorded version now if you've missed them. We talk about some of these subjects. And if you really want to, then give us a bell, of course. And you'll be talking to me, as we talked about just now. And we'll have a very frank discussion about where you're at in your business. And I insist with all of those, and I say to everybody,

There's no point turning that into a sales conversation. So I won't. This is very much trying to help. In fact, I was in a call the other day with a successful property magnate down in Chichester on the South Coast, which is a little away from us. Spent an hour on the phone, gave him loads of advice on what he wanted to do next, and he was really grateful for it. He said, how can I pay you back for all this? It was just a chat out of blue.

I said, well, just go and do a favor to somebody else. Pass it on. And if everybody does that, if we'll take that view that we'll all help people for nothing, then someone else one day will come back and help you for nothing. It all goes around, right? So let's all take that attitude that we're not all in it for a quick buck. Let's all try and help each other. There's a big market out there, and we work better together.

Adam (45:00.642)

That's a great spot to end on. Thank you very much, Dave. Thanks for joining me on the Fractional CFO Show and really appreciate your insight, your perspective and your time. Thank you.

Adam (45:17.474)

Thank you.