Growing a business is a little like raising a child. From the early days of worrying if you’re going to inadvertently harm your ‘baby’, to the stressful highs and lows of navigating the changes that come raising a successful business, we’ve had an eventful 16 years at The Roundtable. In celebration of our anniversary week, we thought we’d take the opportunity to look back at a few of the milestones along the way and share some of the lessons learned.
The Primary School Years (2015-2017)
Primary school at The Roundtable was a time of making new friendships, learning our strengths and starting to figure out how to replicate success by expanding our coaching team. These years in business are often about standardization and systematization of processes and identifying the next opportunity to support a growing list of clients.
Milestones:
- Program Expansion. In 2016 we launched our second group coaching program: The Roundtable Catalyst group mentoring program. Designed to drive conversations that matter and support organizational change initiative, our Catalyst community grows stronger each year. In 2023, this program won three awards of excellence: ICF Prism Award (Toronto), I4PL Award of Excellence (National) and The Brandon Hall Award.
- New Look. New-ish Name. After much discussion, we decide to drop the word ‘executive’ from our name and simply become The Roundtable: where leaders cultivate leadership together. Ironically, after dropping the ‘executive’ from our name, we expanded to do more work with executive teams as part of our team coaching practice.
- Canadian HR Awards. We were very proud (and somewhat surprised) to win the 2016 External HR Advisor/Consultancy of the Year from the Canadian HR Awards. This one was special because it was nominated and voted on by our clients.
Lessons Learned:
- Let Your Clients Guide You. Consulting firms build their reputation off the fact that they are the smartest people in the room. I’ve preferred to approach our work in a more collaborative way with clients. By embracing a client-centric approach, we’ve been able to co-create programs that work with our clients.
- The Right Talent, at the Right Time is a Game-Changer. I was fortunate during these years that Shelby Brown joined the team. Shelby’s can-do attitude and unbelievable capacity to ‘get sh*t’ done was one of the main reasons I was able to move from being ‘in’ the business to ‘on’ the business and double our revenues during this period. In pivotal roles, you need exceptional people and that’s who we found in Shelby.
- Always Write the Speech. When we won our Canadian HR Awards I hadn’t prepared a speech because I really didn’t think we’d win. Never again. Now I have something ready to go and, if I do say so myself, my award speech at the 2018 RBC Women Entrepreneur of the Year Awards was FIRE. Let’s just say I channelled Snoop Dogg.
