About Joseph

For 70 years, I believed 217 Horton Lane was Grandma Pritchard’s house. Then I looked it up – just curious, family browsing. Imagine my surprise to see the address of Bradford Union Workhouse!

So much of my life suddenly made sense. 

The 1948 National Assistance Act abolished the last vestiges of the Poor Law and the workhouse. But, if you were born in Bradford Union Workhouse, only the words 217 Horton Lane appeared on your birth certificate without further clarification. It was a well-intentioned omission by the Guardians designed to smooth your path in life – to hide the social stigma and assumed shame of your heritage.

At least, that’s my guess.

The Infirmary of the Bradford Union Workhouse was finally conscripted into the new British National Health Service in 1948 and became St Luke’s Hospital. I was born two years later, and my place of birth was, and still is, recorded as 217 Horton Lane.

Make of that what you will.

For forty years, I have launched and built business ventures. These include global food and drink brands, international pharma and engineering firms, national media, retail, perfume, alternative products, software, tech hardware, marketing services, training, advertising, business process outsourcing, and management consulting.

Building a brand or a business takes time, even if you start quickly. So, in most cases, my business relationships are deep and long – the profit and loss account and balance sheet measure your results.

There have been failures and some expensive lessons. But the successes are many and include:

  • – Building Merchants, a start-up CX BPO business into a £40M
    business at current prices: founder member through to trade sale.
  • – Creating a new corporate strategy for Eden Project that provided the platform for international expansion projects in China and Costa Rica – seven years in development.
  • – Helping to turn an international corporate culture – Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd, £1billion turnover plus – from copycat to R&D using NLP.
  • – Executing a turnaround in an automotive engineering SME – Chicane Aston Martin Performance – including business redesign and recruitment of a new management team. Figures show a doubling of sales revenue and profitability over a consistent five-year period.
  • – Exploding profitable sales of an SME – Nannycare Goat milk – through precise recruitment, leading to account listings with major multiples – Tesco, Boots, Waitrose, for example
  • – Helping a founder to establish BCohCo as a start-up business – trading as a learning & development & consultancy business in equity and cohesion through their DICE framework

To add to my extensive and first-class practical experience, I have studied strategy to Master of Business Administration level at Ashridge Business School – it costs forty-nine thousand pounds in fees to complete this programme at Ashridge today – and have extensive certifications in Neuro-Linguistic programming to global trainer and consulting standards.

And I have developed a simple software application to help analyse and display the risk at the different levels of strategic analysis. You will have access to this unique APP for the Zero To Hero programme, which visually illustrates the chance and opportunity involved in your strategy – section by section – in a layered traffic light system.