The launch of Trusted was a very special occasion. When one of my authors has a book launch it’s ALWAYS a special occasion, of course, but this one was exceptional for a number of reasons:
- It was two authors, not one, both of whom had written every word of the book over six months of online and offline collaboration without a single cross word.
- The launch was hosted and catered by University College, Birmingham, with the students taking responsibility for planning, setting up, welcoming, serving, and catering the evening as part of an assessed module. It was their way of repaying the authors for months of support with employability skills, and they produced the best spread of food I have ever seen at a book launch. (And I have been to a lot of book launches.)
- It’s the only launch I’ve ever been to with its own cocktail, the T-spot. It tasted even better than it looks.
- It was the first live recording of The Extraordinary Business Book Club podcast interview.
Sadly, the thing that can happen with live things happened, and the audio file was lost. So today’s episode is a rerun of that interview. In it Lyn and Donna talk about the inspiration for Trusted, how they wrote together so effectively, and how their book is working for their business.
And as promised, here are some pictures from the launch, beginning (and indeed ending) with that fabulous T-spot cocktail:
LINKS:
First Impressions: http://www.firstimpressions.uk.com/
First Impressions on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FirstImpressionsTraining/
First Impressions on Twitter: https://twitter.com/FstImpressions
Lyn on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lynbromley/
Donna on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/donnawhitbrook/
The 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge: https://alisonjones.leadpages.co/proposal-challenge/
Alison on Twitter: https://twitter.com/bookstothesky
The Extraordinary Business Book Club on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1447064765612358/
Alison Jones: Hello, and welcome to the Extraordinary Business Book Club, and to the second time that I have interviewed today’s guests, which is a first for me. We actually recorded this podcast live at the launch of their book, which I’ll tell you about in a moment, at University College, Birmingham, and it was fantastic. But unfortunately, there was a problem with the sound. So we’re doing it again, and it’s lovely to have a second chance to talk to Lyn Bromley and Donna Whitbrook who are the authors of ‘Trusted: the Human Approach to Building Outstanding Client Relationships in a Digitised World’. Welcome, both, to the show.
Lyn Bromley: Thank you, Alison. Hi.
Donna Whitbrook: Thank you, Alison.
Alison Jones: It’s great to have you here. Now, I’m just going to introduce you briefly before we get going. Lyn Bromley has been the Managing Director of First Impressions Training Ltd since September 2010. She’s an experienced people manager, trainer and consultant. Her wide-ranging corporate background spans finance, training consultancy and project management. She’s held senior leadership positions and has worked with clients from a whole host of industries from financial services to law, from SMEs to Blue Chip organisations.
And Donna Whitbrook is an experienced corporate consultant and people developer – her extensive corporate background spans finance, training consultancy, performance improvement, governance and strategy, and she’s held senior management positions in banking and finance and board level positions in the public and third sectors. And together, they both have a real belief in the work that they promote. They’re passionate about developing leaders and helping businesses to transform the performance of their individuals and teams and helping them to reflect their organization’s brand vision and values and develop a world-class service to their valued clients.
And I have to say, having worked with both of them for a while, they absolutely live and breathe this. And I think, wouldn’t you agree, ladies, that the launch itself reflected that brilliantly as well? It was such a wonderful event.
Lyn Bromley: Yes, it really did. We absolutely loved it. And it’s a real shame that the recording didn’t quite work, but we said actually, it doesn’t matter too much, because this is just take two, and hopefully it will be even better this time.
Alison Jones: That’s right. We never get to rehearse, normally. This is great. I will put up some pictures on the show notes of the launch, just to show you what a truly magnificent … It’s the only launch I’ve ever been to that’s had its own bespoke cocktail, the T-Spot cocktail. I mean, what could be better? It was fantastic. So let’s kick off. Lyn, I’m going start with you, if that’s okay.
Let’s start with the big, big question. Why “Trusted?” What prompted you to write the book in the first place, and why do you think it’s needed?
Lyn Bromley: Well, therein lies a story. Donna and I had both been working together developing some bespoke workshops for a couple of clients last summer. And we live about 50 miles apart, so we used to meet up halfway at a shopping centre and we were sitting in a café one day, and I looked at Donna and said, “Gosh, we’ve got so much research for these workshops we’re going to be starting next September, we’ve almost got enough to write a book.”
And we sort of looked at each other and smiled, and then we said actually, joking apart, we’ve both got pretty much 30 years of experience of working, as you described in your fantastic introduction there. And then First Impressions, the business that I took over just over seven years ago, has been going for over 30 years as well, 33, almost 34, next April. So, between us we’ve got a huge amount of experience that we can offer.
So we decided that, actually, it would be great to pool that knowledge and put that into a book. And I suppose, in terms of why is it needed, we really think that there’s a lot of bad press for the poor old millennials. They’ve got a bit of a bad rap just recently, in that people think that they’re terrible at communicating and they can only talk into their phones, or text, or Facebook or Snapchat or whatever it might be.
And in actual fact, what we noticed is that it isn’t just the millennials that have a problem with that. It’s actually across all of the age ranges, to the point where we challenge our clients: why drop an e-mail to somebody who sits just around the corner from you or, in some cases, on the next desk? Why not turn to them or get up and walk around the corner and go and have a conversation? So there’s a huge amount of research that shows there’s great benefit in doing that. It increases collaboration and team work and creativity as well.
So for us that was the first point, really, that we thought was why it was needed. And also, we live in very much a one-click world now. We can easily order things. We can even talk to the likes of Alexa to order something for us, and one click on the likes of Amazon and ordering taxis and ebay and all these sorts of things. And actually, we’ve become very impatient. So the landscape of service and what we expect from service is really changing. And actually, some of these more traditional values of communicating with each other and building trust at a human level are really needed right now.
Alison Jones: Yes. I recognise everything you say. That’s so true. Donna, do you want to add anything to that?
Donna Whitbrook: Yes I think adding on to Lyn’s point now, we now have less tolerance of things going wrong, so we’re more likely to complain. And again, those complaints can be heard at the click of a button. So these skills now, in business, are the most important skills, I think, that need to be brought to business.
There’s competitors flooding the market everywhere, and whilst some people are very price sensitive, and they’ll keep trying to drive prices down just to get the best deal, a lot of consumers out there want a great service. They’re not particularly that price sensitive. But what they want to see is some value for the money they’re paying. And that substantiated value comes from the people and how the service is delivered to them, the skill set they have around those great relationship-building skills.
So the skill set that has been declining over the last, I would say, 30 years, while technology has grown in business, really need to be brought back into business. Those that were considered soft a few years ago, and noone would have perhaps considered writing a book like this around these skills, now they are becoming the most important thing in business to differentiate.
Alison Jones: Yes, it’s so interesting. It’s almost ironic isn’t it? The more digital we become, the more we value the human.
Donna Whitbrook: Absolutely.
Alison Jones: And I must say, in terms of the actual writing of the book, in my career I’ve worked with several co-authoring teams over the years, and without a shadow of a doubt, I can say that you two were the most effective and efficient and good humoured. Tell us your secret: how did you work together, and what do you think made it so successful?
Donna Whitbrook: Thank you, Alison. Well, first and foremost, I think having a book coach, having you, that was really important to us. Neither Lyn nor myself had written a book before. Yes, we’d written lots of strategy documents. We’d written lots of pages in business, but we’d never written a book. So not having that, we had the knowledge of what we wanted to put in a book, but how to write to a book? We didn’t have that skill set. So using you as our book coach, and having those check-ins with you every few weeks, and having a clear plan and knowing where we were going, that was really important to us.
But also, using people around us that we knew had written books, and people we would listen to on the Extraordinary Business Book Club, and learning from the insights that they gave us and the lessons that they’d given us too, from the mistakes they’d made. And whilst we tried not to fall into those traps, we did fall into a few. Both Lyn and I love telling stories and we love sharing stories, as you know, so we’ve written and shared a lot in our book. And whilst we were interviewing the 22 contributors, for the book, we actually got their advice on even writing the book, and what could they do to help us make this the best book for our readers.
Alison Jones: That’s just so good to hear, and it’s fantastic. You are a classic case study in exactly the people that I’m putting the podcast together for. So it’s beyond good to hear that it did the job for you. It’s terrific.
Donna Whitbrook: Yes, absolutely.
Lyn Bromley: Yes, and I think what we also did, Alison, is we took some of our own medicine as well. So, the very first section that we write about in the book is mindset. What we did is, I think the benefit of working together is, if one of us had a bit of an off day, then the other one could really boost that other person and help to hold us to account. And if you get that imposter syndrome coming in – ‘Who are we to write a book, who’ll want to read what we’ve written…’ – again, the other one could really tell us to pull our socks up and get over it and move on.
So there’s a lot of … Both of us are trained in coaching and NLP, so we really utilised our knowledge and helped each other if we ever felt the need for that. And I think it’s very much about having that success mindset. Both of us are the kind of people that if we set our mind to do something, then we know we’ll achieve it. We’re not people that would say we’ll do something and then never do it. So we knew that we would absolutely finish this book, achieve it, and get it out there. And I think that mindset piece was really important.
And both of us are extroverts as well. So we like working together. We like being with people. We get our energy from being with people. In fact, after the book launch, I think probably about four, five days later was the first day that I worked at home on my own, and I actually had a bit of a blue day. And I was thinking, “Where is everybody? I’m used to having all these people around me. There’s no one here.”
I think Donna was at a network event that day, and I was just doing some admin, and for us, it’s very much about having people with us. I think that really helps us to bounce ideas off each other. And if ever we got stuck with what to write, because of what we’re writing about, it’s very much what we deliver in workshops and really pooling all of that knowledge together, we just said, “Well, how do say it in a workshop?” So, if we ever did get stuck, then that really helped us to move forward.
And I think I can only really remember one day through the whole of the writing process where we were both scratching our heads a bit. And we came back to what we’d written the next day and just said, “Oh, my God, that was absolute rubbish, wasn’t it? Let’s scrap it and start again.” But I think that was only one day out the whole of the writing and it took us six months, from January through to June, to do the writing of it. There was only that one day that I can really remember that we had that. So that really worked for us, working together.
And just in terms of the practicalities of it, because we do live 50 miles apart it wasn’t practical to keep getting together all of the time, which might seem quite ironic, given the fact that we talk about the human approach. But what we did is we used Zoom, which is very similar to Skype, and we shared the document on the screen so I could do the typing and share my document with Donna. Donna, of course then, could use her laptop for doing research, so if there was something we needed to look up, or get a date or a reference, then Donna could do that.
And I think just focusing our mind on seeing each other’s little picture on the screen, because we could always see each other whilst we were doing the work, it really kept us focused and accountable. When you’re in a room, and sometimes we did get and physically meet, either in an office, at each other’s houses or coffee shops, there are always distractions going on. Whereas when you’re just looking at each other and the screen and you’ve got the document there in front of you, it just meant that it kept us incredibly focused, and we knew then, it was a bit of an anchor for us I suppose, as well. We knew then that when we sat down to write that was our writing space.
And we just got on with it and really used all of our planning that we’d put together with you, and kept ticking off the goals. And I think we pretty much hit every single deadline that we had. So chunking it down into those small chunks really helped. Because often, we were still doing our day job as well, and so we didn’t always have an entire day to write together. So it might just be a couple of hours, here, a couple of hours there. We did a little bit at the weekends as well. But generally, we did it all around our normal delivery schedule that we have.
Alison Jones: Yeah, and you’re right. Getting it chunked down, that table of contents working, is absolutely key to doing it. It means you can use the time when you have it, doesn’t it?
What’s interesting as well is that often when people co-write, they divvy the book up between themselves, But you didn’t, did you? You actually, pretty much every word, the both of you wrote together. It’s amazing.
Donna Whitbrook: Yes, yes we did. We decided we didn’t want to divide and conquer, because we wanted to make sure the tone … We were very conscious of having conversations with you, and about making sure the tone was our tone throughout the book, and it was one tone. We didn’t want the reader to get confused in either a style of writing, language, who’s saying this? And because we’re both true believers in every word we’d written, they had to be our words, they had to be our beliefs. Because we didn’t want people to read the book and then meet us, and we’re different to what’s actually said in the book.
So to us it was about being totally authentic, totally genuine. And the words that went into the book were our words and our beliefs.
Lyn Bromley: And I think because we have shared values as well, that really helped. So when we first started working together, that’s why we clicked and wanted to work together so quickly, it’s because we have got very similar values. And in actual fact, we’ve got similar … One of the things we do with our clients is we use DISC profiling to help them to understand communication styles. And we’ve actually got quite a similar profile. We have got differences as well, but there are some similarities there in the way we work to put our quotes across, in any case. So hopefully, it means that it sounds as though it is one voice throughout the whole book.
Alison Jones: I think you absolutely nailed that. I think it’s beautifully done. Now obviously, we’ve only just launched the book, so this is a little bit early for this question. But just tell us a little bit about how you see the book working with the bigger business. I know it’s started to do that already. What do you hope that it’s going to achieve for you?
Lyn Bromley: Well that was very much our thought process from the very beginning, and it was quite some time ago now, I had met one of your contributors to the podcast actually, Daniel Priestly from Dent, and he was talking about “Key Person of Influence.” And he was probably one of the first people I heard talk about having a book as part of your business, and having it as an integral part. And I just loved that model and avidly wrote it all down. I just knew that one day I would implement that when I was in the right place to do that. And this definitely felt like the right time to write this book.
And I know one of the things that Daniel talks about is that a book acts a little bit like a business development manager or a sales person for your business, because it’s out there, people are reading it, and it definitely feels now that it’s got a life of its own. We’ve had people contact… Over the weekend I had somebody contact me. He was a third-degree contact on LinkedIn, in another country. And he said, “Oh, this sounds like the kind of book I would like. How do I get a hold of it?” And I thought, “Really, that’s exactly how we wanted it to work.”
So, it’s definitely working as an extra salesperson, if you like, in the business. And what we designed when first started to think about the book is, we’d already got things like logs and our social media. But what we want to do going forward, and again, we got this idea from one of your contributors is, we thought, well actually, what we have to do is we currently deliver very bespoke workshops, and we get in, and we really understand what the issues are and what the outcomes are for the client. And so it’s very much a bespoke high-end workshop that we deliver for our clients.
And we thought, there’s bound to be other smaller SMEs that maybe read the book and want to tap into what we do. So what we designed as part of putting the book together is the five different aspects that we’ve written about in our T-spot model. We designed a workshop for each of those five areas, and then an overarching one, which is all about the culture and the values of the organisation as well. So we have got something that we can offer to smaller SMEs as well as the larger SMEs and bigger corporates that we tend to work with the majority of the time.
So it’s very important to us to have different jumping-on points, if you like, for the different kind of clients and people that might want to work with us going forward. So it might be that that price point might be book, and that’s fine. That might be all they every do, is read our book. And that’s great, because it means that we’ve passed on our education to somebody at that point.
And I think it was Nicholas Lovell who talked about the curve on your podcast?
Alison Jones: That’s exactly what I was just thinking about, yes.
Lyn Bromley: And it’s about having those different touch-points where people can jump on can get something from you, even if they’re not necessarily going to become one of our high-end bespoke clients that we work with. There’s something there for everybody. So it’s very much about having the book as an integral part of that product infrastructure, if you like, that we have.
Alison Jones: But I love the way that actually new product comes out, almost, of the work that you’ve done on the book, and that once you have that little distinctive bit of intellectual property, that T-spot model, which I do love, then you can actually generate more products off the back of that as well. So it’s lovely demonstration of how the work on the book is actually work in the business.
Donna Whitbrook: Yes. It was important to us to create characters in the book, Alison, that people could connect with, and use the book in their business. We wanted the book to help our business and to grow our business, but we also wanted the book to help other people’s business, and not be a business book that was picked up, read and then put down. We wanted people to use it as an ongoing tool, and to bring some of the characters in the book: the credibility sleuth, where people find their 1% improvements, and the credibility thief, the little character who, when he appears in your persona or your business, he robs you and your business of your credibility.
So we wanted to introduce these characters, so that people could use them as an ongoing tool in their business. And throughout the book, we share many of our stories, so that as people get to know us, get to know Lyn and I, we share some very personal things in the book, that many business writers do now, because it is about that story telling. It’s about people reading that book, getting to know us through the book, and then wanting to get to know us in person. Some of those people may be able to afford to use us in their business to help them. But if they can’t they’re still getting very much a piece of us.
Lyn Bromley: Yes.
Alison Jones: Absolutely. That’s beautifully put, actually, isn’t it? The book is a little piece of you. I love that Daniel Priestly thing about the book is the business development manager, always on-message, never off sick and so on. But actually, it’s even more powerful than that, isn’t it? It’s like sending a little bit of you out into the world.
Donna Whitbrook: Yes, and it is. Because already I was out at a high profile event last week, and several people came up to me saying, “Aren’t you one half of that ‘Trusted'”? And the fascinating … and I will share this story, because I do love sharing stories, the fascinating thing about it was, one guy asked for a picture with me with his book that he clearly wrote, and I thought I was meeting a businessman from Birmingham. He was an ex Olympian of six medals, and he’d actually come up to me, loved what we’d shared in the book, loved how we absolutely stripped everything back to these fundamental skills people need, and said he will be using the book throughout his business and when he meets people, and how he works with people, that he will use of our expressions our characters, which is absolutely fantastic to hear.
When people are taking your book away, picking up the message that you’re giving, learning from it and then sharing it in business, we’re not precious about our intellectual property, saying, “Oh, no. Don’t use these words. Don’t say these.” We’re quite happy that he goes out there and does that, because that’s the message that we’re wanting to share.
Alison Jones: That’s awesome. How often does an Olympian come and ask for your autograph? That’s very, very cool.
Donna Whitbrook: So cool. So cool.
Alison Jones: Now, if I asked you for your one best tip for somebody who’s listening going, “Oh, they did it, and I’m still plugging away.” What’s your best tip for somebody who might be listening, where you were maybe a year ago and writing their business book?
Donna Whitbrook: Okay. Mine is, I’m Donna, and mine is knowing when you want to write that book, and only writing the book when you feel that passion inside you and that fire. If we try and write a book and we haven’t felt that, then we can very much be going through a process, and people won’t feel that passion and won’t read it in that way.
So when you know, we’ve all got that book inside of us. When you feel that burn in your tummy, and you’re clear on what you want to write about, it becomes really, really easy. So my big tip would be don’t do it too soon Don’t stop yourself from doing it. When you feel that burn, that’s time. Write the book.
Alison Jones: Feel the burn. I love that. Do you know, there’s actually a little section in the front of “This Book Means Business” going, is it the right time to write your book? Because you’re right. There’s a moment where you go off the boil, but there’s a moment also when it’s not quite the time, and you’re not on the boil. So yes, it’s just finding that point. That’s a really nice way of putting it. Excellent. Thank you, Donna. Lyn, what about you?
Lyn Bromley: Just echoing what Donna said there, really. I’d wanted to write a book for years and years. English was always my favourite subject at school, and I’ve always felt that I would write a book one day. And when I heard Daniel speak about it, I thought, “Yes, I know I’m going to do this.” But it was very much… The time wasn’t right for me back then. And the book itself wasn’t fully formed, whereas now it does feel like the right time. Because I feel as though all of the things I’ve done over my career have come together. And then obviously meeting Donna and working with Donna as well. It’s meant that it was the right time, so I think that’s really key.
I think my tip I wanted to share, as you all know, Alison, we had a slight glitch with the printing of the, book which was obviously right at the very end of the process. Things had all gone really swimmingly, and obviously we were starting to get close to our deadline and our publish date, and also the launch, which was the week after the publish date. So it was all starting to get a little bit hairy.
And what we actually did, we had a number of conversations, obviously between the three of us. And I know you were speaking to the printers as well, to help us to get it resolved, which fantastic. And in the end we said, “Let’s just go down and see them.” And this was actually an enormous printing company, and so they’re not used to people just wanting to call in and see them. But actually, it worked really well for us.
And again, going back to that story of the human touch, and being able to build those interactions and build those connections with people worked absolutely like a dream. Because actually for them, it was just another business book, because they print all the time, 24 hours a day globally. And yet when we went down to see them, they realised why it was so important to us. They realised why the quality was important, because one of the aspects we talk about is that whole profession image piece, and obviously the look and feel of the book was just as important to us as the words on the page.
And this isn’t just a black and white business book. It has colour, and it has images in there, and we wanted it to look really beautiful, because we know, again from our background of understanding about communication styles, some people will be very visual, other people are more auditory. And actually, the visual ones are going to want something that is really nice to look at.
I remember one of your phrases Alison, early on, was having somewhere for the readers to rest their eyes, which we just loved that phrase. And so we wanted to have the diagrams and the bullet lists and things that make it easy for the reader to be able to find things that they wanted to reference back again. And so that was why it was really important to us to have the right quality and the right look and feel.
And by going down and explaining to them about the launch that we’ve got coming, and what we did is… As we said, we launched at UCB and we’ve worked for a couple of years with the students there, going in and delivering employability skills for them. And we were putting this event on in collaboration with them, because as part of their final year qualification that they need to do, and I think Donna will talk about the details of that shortly, what they asked is, could we wrap it up into an assessment for them. So, it wasn’t just us that it was important to. It was important to the students, because they were going to be assessed on the event that they ran for us.
So it was a hugely important thing. We didn’t want it to be put back, and we didn’t want to have the launch with no new book, to be able to deliver. So, it just worked perfectly. They suddenly pulled out all the stops, and we got the books two days before the launch, and it was all absolutely fine in the end. But I think that going and seeing them and having those conversations face to face made it more real for them, and it was real people, not just a book that was being printed.
Alison Jones: Yeah. It was such an interesting experience for me as well, actually, because obviously the printer responded. They were fixing things, but it was sort of business as usual. They’re fixing it, and they’re going ahead. And then suddenly they met you, and it transformed how they felt about this. Suddenly it was, “We have to do this for Lyn and Donna, and they want this,” and oh, this is really interesting. You make that human connection, it changes everything. Really interesting.
Lyn Bromley: Yes.
Donna Whitbrook: It does. And I think so often now in business, Alison, that when we’ve seen people we meet, and the relationships just are built up… It’s very much a transactional approach that a lot of business are going for. And that is fine when everything goes right. Or when that client, customer, patient, guest, whoever they may be, fits into what’s being offered. But as soon as someone comes along that wants something different, wants it bespoke, wants a real tailored service, then it’s problematic. And it’s only building relationships that will actually get over those problems.
So echoing what Lyn said, by us then building relationship with the people at the printers, we got this result quite easily. It didn’t feel like that, obviously, while we were going through it, but it was quite simple to resolve because people go to know us, they got to like us, they got to understand our values. They got to understand why things were so important. And that is really quite typical of business nowadays.
If we can work on those skills in business and get people to understand their clients in the very same way, then it’s easy to do business with that client, and it’s easy for the client to do business with your organisation. So it’s a win-win.
Alison Jones: Yes. Absolutely. Now, I’m very aware that we’re running out of time, but do you want to have a quick word about the launch as well? Because I know that was such a special event, maybe just share with people how it went.
Donna Whitbrook: Yeah, absolutely fascinating that a group of 35 students from the Culinary Arts degree course who had it as part of an assessed module, they designed all of the marketing literature for the evening. They made all of the food. They are trained in top hotels in Birmingham. Some of the very top chefs helped to train these students. And they did all of the decorations for the evening. They designed a beautiful T-spot cocktail.
Lyn Bromley: It was very good.
Donna Whitbrook: Yes. And what was great is they understood, by meeting Lyn and I, understood what we stood for, what we do stand for. And they interpreted that in the most spectacular way. They surpassed all of our expectations. And it really gave them, as well, some great experience into meeting some of our valued clients, meeting our family and friends who obviously we absolutely love and adore. So we trusted them to do that, and we let them be creative and innovative. We allowed that. We didn’t want to stifle any of that. And they came up with this brilliant evening.
And the fact that we support the university, and have done for 18 months, with their employability skills and career resilience, which is a completely different skill set to getting an academic qualification. So by helping them to understand how we behave around people. How we develop great relationships, how we communicate even when we all have different communication styles and preferences, and how we maintain that great professional image and a real positive growth mindset, they used all that we talk about in ‘Trusted’ on the evening. They exemplified everything that’s in our book, and we were really thrilled and proud that they’d been able to do that.
Alison Jones: That’s lovely, and it’s such a lovely demonstration as well of how when you put generosity out into the world, it comes back at you tenfold, doesn’t it? Lovely.
Donna Whitbrook: Yes.
Lyn Bromley: Definitely.
Alison Jones: I always ask people, as you know, to recommend a guest on this show, so someone with something interesting to say about business books. Who would you both recommend that I should invite on as a guest?
Lyn Bromley: I’m actually going to suggest somebody who was at our launch, in fact, a couple of weeks ago, a lady by the name of Sarah Windrum, who’s a friend of mine and a business associate. And her book isn’t so much of a business book, but she is a business woman. She is the CEO of Emerald Group, which is an IT business, and she’s also on the Mental Health Select Committee as well. So, Sarah’s somebody who does a huge amount for other people. She’s constantly at all sort of charity events and local support events. She’s on the local LEP and all sorts of things. She’s a fantastic person.
And her book that she’s just recently published is called ‘The Superhero I was Born to Be’, and it’s very much is around covering mental health. And obviously, it’s really important to bear that in mind for business, because a lot of employees and team members may have some mental health challenges. So I think Sarah will be a great guest to you to invite on.
Alison Jones: Fantastic. And I met her very, very briefly at the launch before I had to run out, so it would be lovely to talk to her properly, thank you. And Donna, what about you?
Donna Whitbrook: Well, I’m going to give you a really tough challenge here, Alison.
Alison Jones: Oh, thank you.
Donna Whitbrook: I really believe you can do it. Mine is Simon Sinek, the author, motivational speaker of ‘Start with Why’, ‘Leaders Eat Last’ and ‘Together is Better’. We were privileged, Lyn and I, to meet Simon back in May, and to talk about our book with him and share with him some of the things that we were covering in the book. And he actually said, yes, it is a much-needed book out there at the moment.
But we admire Simon, because all that he brings is around gracious and goodwill, that giving back. And when you do that, you get it back in abundance. So I think he would be a great one if you can get him on the show.
Alison Jones: He’d be terrific. In fact, I don’t really you understand why he hasn’t asked already, why he hasn’t e-mailed me and said … I know. But I shall overlook that oversight and ask him on. Yeah, keep your fingers crossed. It’d be terrific to talk to him. That would be amazing.
So, if people want to find out more about First Impressions, more about you, Lyn and Donna, where should they go?
Lyn Bromley: The best place to go initially is our website, and that is www.firstimpressions.uk.com, and if it’s the book that they want, then if they add /Trusted, that takes you straight to the book section of the website. And we’re also on Facebook as First Impressions Training Limited, and Twitter as well, you’ll find us under First Impressions. And we’re both on LinkedIn as well, so Lyn Bromley and Donna Whitbrook. And of course, we’re very happy to receive a phone call or an e-mail as well. So do get in touch. We love to chat to people and find out what they think about the book, and how we can help them going forward too.
Alison Jones: Brilliant. I shall put all those links up on the show notes, that’s wonderful. And you know, we’ve gone a little bit over time, but you know what? There’s three people in the conversation, so I think, we haven’t really done bad at all…
Lyn Bromley: Definitely. Thank you.
Alison Jones: So good to talk to you both. Thank you so much. Goodbye.
Lyn Bromley: Thank you. Goodbye.
Very good Lyn and Donna. We are sure your book will be successful. Good luck for the future in everything you do xx