Richard Sargent
Having started his career in manufacturing, Richard then moved into the financial services industry where he gained professional qualifications in investment management and personal finance sales.
He then moved to an AON subsidiary where he was part of a high profile sales and business development team operating within the consumer and business finance markets. His prime responsibility was both to develop their account base and enhance the sales performance of their key clients, dealing with specialised insurance and financial products such as leasing, insurance and consumer financing.
His success as a senior relationship manager culminated in him being promoted into the training division, a major profit centre for AON, reaching the position of Head of Training prior to him joining Euromoney in 1997.
In 1999 he left to form PAR. Richard has successfully delivered learning programmes to management and sales teams world-wide. He is a highly respected sales and management development consultant with the capability to guide and innovate – his interactive, engaging training style motivating everyone he works with.
Richard holds a BSc in Mechanical Engineering and is a registered occupational tester with the British Psychological Society. He has also qualified as an NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) Licensed Business Practitioner.
Nic Oliver
After graduating, Nic worked for 12 years in the UK Civil Service in finance, project management, industrial relations and training before moving on to the financial services industry.
He has spent the last 25 years as a learning and development consultant, specialising in Organisational Transformation, leadership development, influencing skills and coaching. Wanting to better understand human behaviour and to improve his coaching skills, he qualified as a NLP Master Practitioner and studied hypnotherapy.
His initial coaching passion lay with working with sports people. Whilst competing at international level, he had seen firsthand that the difference between the best and the rest is largely psychological and in particular how an individual handles stress, rather than being due to physical talent.
Nic spends much of his time working in both the corporate and public sectors, focusing on
- Leadership Development,
- Influencing Skills,
- Teambuilding,
- Writing Skills,
- Coaching.
Nic is also a qualified applied kinesiologist, having co-developed with his wife an approach to healing that combines applied kinesiology, NLP and life-coaching, which they travel the world teaching together.
Peter Willis
Peter began his career as a manager with Cadbury Typhoo where he spent three years as a Production Manager, Work Study Engineer and finally as Divisional Training Manager, based on the Wirral.
Having experienced business from the Production perspective Peter moved into the Sales and Marketing sphere where he worked for three and a half years with Imperial Group in sales and merchandising and then as Sales Training Manager before becoming Company Management Development Manager within the Wine and Spirits Division of Courage Limited.
Having decided to broaden his experience by working in logistics and warehousing, he had a three year stint with TNT as Group Training Manager for TNT (UK/Europe) Road Freight as well as a secondment to Skypak – the Air Cargo and courier services business where he gained extensive experience in Dubai, Sharjah, Bahrain and Egypt as well as EEC countries.
What has now been a twenty two year continuous career in Training and Management Consulting commenced with two and a half years working with Hay Management Consultants (London) as a Senior Consultant in the Organisation and Management Development Practice before establishing his own business People Development Matters in January 1990.
Peter has specialised over the past 22 years in the following areas:
- Leadership and Management Development,
- Managing Change,
- Organisation Design and Strategic Planning,
- Competency,Grading and the Recognition of Contribution,
- Performance Management,
- Business Education,
- Team Development.
Peter spends his spare time with his wife and their nine children and he is an avid fan of both music and sport – the latter only as a spectator these days.
Ralph Houston
Ralph graduated from Aston Business School in Birmingham in 1981 as a Mobil Oil Prize Winner in Business Finance. He is an experienced Human Resource and Performance Management Consultant with many years of international client work behind him in both the public and private sectors in:
- senior management development,
- financial training,
- executive coaching,
- change management,
- performance management.
Since 2002 he has headed up Houston Business Performance Consulting, (Houston BPC), a specialised professional services firm providing executive coaching, organisational development and change management support services to a wide range of private and public sector clients.
In the ten years prior to establishing his own business Ralph held the position of Managing Director, Fielden-Cegos Ltd. Fielden-Cegos is the UK arm of Cegos SA, Europe’s largest management development organisation.
Before working with Fielden-Cegos, Ralph was Principal Consultant with the Hay Group where he focused on the reward and remuneration aspects of performance management. During the 1980’s he was Marketing Director for Birmingham Chamber of Commerce and before that he trained as an accountant with Deloitte, Haskins and Sells.
Mary Corrie
Mary has been involved with team development, leadership and coaching individuals, top teams and businesses since 1990.
After graduating from Oxford University in 1984, she spent a couple of years working with Shelter before joining Shell. During her 13 year international career with Shell, Mary was involved with many multinational teams requiring help in developing necessary skills to work effectively in increasingly pressured markets. Specifically, in Pakistan, where, as marketing director, she was involved in establishing a new Shell operating company with local staff.
Mary was then transferred to Shell Turkey which was facing a complete business re-engineering. Mary was involved in setting up new businesses with the appropriate leadership skills to drive and then maintain change. Mary’s final role in Shell was as European B2B brand and communications director. In this role, she continued to pioneer the positive impact of coaching and mentoring on bringing a large, multinational team together from across the 26 countries Shell called Europe. She found that by coaching her own management team to develop and use a coaching style in their work, they in turn achieved far more, more effectively and with a much greater buy-in from their own suppliers, stakeholders and staff.
Since leaving Shell in 2000, Mary has formalised her leadership and coaching training and experience by working as an affiliate with Human Systems where she received significant coaching herself as well as training from Graham Alexander, and then more recently with Metamorphosis Coaching. Mary has worked with many national and multinational companies such as JP Morgan, BAE Systems, IBM, Shell and Goldman Sachs as well as many private individuals and SMEs.
Mary is a Full Member of The Association for Coaching and is also a fellow of the RSA and has spoken at many conferences on topics to help women maximise on their effectiveness at work.
The key areas of development training offered by Mary are:
- Executive Coaching
- Change Management, specialising in the follow through as well as the strategic elements so that companies and people really do embrace the change needed.
- Team development and dynamics, including work with international virtual teams
- Leadership development
Mary lives in Wiltshire with her husband, Tony, and their two sons, Freddie (11) and Angus (9).