Welcome to Glow London Ltd! Interesting that I should finally be welcoming people to a blog and website having actually been operating as Glow for five years. As with many marketers, like hairdressers with bad hair… I have been absolutely rubbish at marketing myself. It’s actually baffling to think how I have managed to develop the business up until now when I haven’t even spoken to my own network about what it is I could do. If I was one of my clients I would bloody throttle me!
For the purposes of this blog… what we’re gonna do here is go right back… to 2006 when I was Sales Director at Eurostar and told as top talent I would be attending a programme run by PlanetK2 called The Athlete at Work. To be honest, I was mostly pissed off at the 2 days out of the office with SUCH a big to-do list. And … the whole athlete thing filled me with terror… there’s me, built for comfort not speed thinking WTAF? Then a guy runs in, wearing a shell suit, flips open his laptop to enter his PB having run there from Abergavenny and I nearly walked. Until PlanetK2 CEO, Keith Hatter stood up and starting talking about performance. And within a couple of hours he had completely changed my life. Because us busy busy people in marketing, well we completely epitomize the corporate approach to performance: focus on the to-do list and the meeting schedule, live on a diet of coffee and convenience food consumed whenever the gap in the diary allows and focus all our energy on the report or how perfectly the fonts line up in a deck or the creative boards (you agency folk do love a board!) rather than on what actually matters, which is our personal delivery. For most of us corporate bods, performance is something we drag out every six months when we have to do an APR. It’s something that we confuse with numbers, with ROI with KPIS… and we feel like the process actually belongs to HR.
But that day, that fateful day back in February 2006, I learnt from the best; from the exceptional insight of people who spend 95% of their time getting ready to perform and just 5% of their time actually performing… learnt about how not just rock up and wing it… but how to have a completely holistic view of performance.. To focus on so much more than the tactical.. To put huge amounts of emphasis on mental, contextual, physical and emotional readiness. And I was hooked!!
And the rest is kind of history… I spent many years interfering and gatecrashing PlanetK2 Christmas parties until eventually, probably just to shut me up, they made me an Non-exec Director and since January this year a fully fledged member of the team. And what’s amazing is I get to do it, but still as my own company – Glow London.
And to explain a bit more about Glow London… in a nutshell, we are a brand consultancy who link brand, culture and performance.
We help businesses and people build and grow by developing REAL brands. And by REAL, I mean brands based on a the core of who they really are (not a vague waffly statement or an overly ambitious claim) and then delivered right across every touch point in the business. “But that’s what many brand consultancies do” I hear you cry! Yes, that’s true. But where Glow London differs is that we do so much more than what non-marketers lovingly refer to as the colouring-in. We not only do the brand stuff, but we then ensure the brand is brought to life across the business; used to drive, motivate and connect the team. And the reason that this is important is threefold;
- firstly because if the brand is the thing that differentiates you it’s what will make people buy from you so everyone should be amplifying it
- secondly as this means it will be motivating and exciting for the team to be connected to it
- and finally as it means everyone is pulling in the same direction.
And, let’s face it, transparency is no longer optional with the always on consumer always ready to expose any brand who is saying one thing yet doing another.
So when Keith came to me to propose we join up our propositions it was a complete no-brainer because of course, when you have a brand that is completely connected into the culture and the DNA of the business and then you give everyone the tools, knowledge and support to improve their own performance in line with that brand… you have the most entirely complete structure for sustainable, effective, powerful, positive change.
Bringing this to life in fairly obvious example; imagine you work for a brand that’s all about being champion of the people and you’re a leader in the finance team. From a performance perspective you could be smashing it on your cashflow, P&L management and debtor days whilst effectively managing your team to do the same. You’ll be chuffed with the fact that you’re ticking those boxes! However… if you’re doing this as a result of paying people in 90 days or using unethical suppliers to keep costs down, you’re actively working against the brand.
What we do is work with our clients to ensure firstly the brand is clear, compelling and brilliantly expressed both externally and internally, and then used to connect the culture and motivate the teams whilst directly driving everyone’s performance – and I can honestly say when everything connects in that way, it’s bloody rocket fuel!!!
