WHAT CLIENTS SAY:

“We have spent the last four years transforming the Finance function to be co-pilots of the business - influencing strategy, direction and decision-making. Charles Kingsmill has been an invaluable part of the project, training and inspiring people at all levels to become more influential in the business. He has successfully organised major competence weeks, involving dozens of technical and soft skills, and has trained and coached managers from all over Europe. We also use him for meetings when really expert facilitation is needed. He is thoroughly professional, yet easy to work with, and I would recommend him to any team wanting to make a real difference.”

Jean-Remy Roussel, VP of Finance, Mars Europe

Are my services right for you?

Most of my clients are profit-centres within medium to large businesses. Many work with one or more brands. They compete in a range of sectors, but they do have some things in common:

• They care about quality. Their customer satisfaction measures are good and there’s more to go for. They care about quality for its own sake, but also because higher quality means better results and more employee involvement.
   
• They employ good, intelligent, hard-working people. When they tap into their real skills and talents, personal productivity can explode. Ditto when they work together in cross-functional teams.
   
• They’re open to change. They know that there’s a point where success makes you smug, or where struggle makes you dejected. And they act to prevent it, by finding new ways of doing things.

But they also face challenges:

• They’re being squeezed by competitors. Their growth record may not be disastrous, but they’re missing their own sales targets. And growth is hard to find in a competitive market. On the one hand, there’s the lean challenger, who’s cutting costs and prices. On the other hand, there are smaller niche players taking significant bites out of the premium end of the market.
   
• They don’t know whether they’re making progress against their strategy. They’re running major projects to improve skills and processes. They’re devoting time and resource to new products and services. But they have to wait until their sales and profit numbers are ready before they know whether they’ve been on track.
   
• And they’re increasingly aware of a disconnect – a gulf between the strategy of the business and the people who are meant to implement it. It’s not that people necessarily disagree with the plan. The main problem is that day-to-day time, budget and resource pressures get in the way. Simply put, people have started to find the business plan irrelevant.

My usual contacts are CEOs; heads of Finance, HR or Marketing; or individual brand leaders. Our working partnership is most likely to be successful if you have many or all of the following characteristics: you’re enthusiastic and open to change; you want to develop the people around you; you’re action-orientated but think before doing; you are a good communicator; you see the value of cross-functional relationships.

>>> Now that you know more about the types of business I work with, find out about how I work.