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.

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 – measuring results in profit and loss.

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

  • – A career working with corporates, from the client and agency side, on national and international brands including General Foods, Tobler Suchard, Pork Farms, Scottish & Newcastle, Grand Metropolitan, Hyundai, Polycell, and New York based Advertising Agency, Benton & Bowles.
  • – Building Merchants, a start-up CX BPO business into a global brand with sixty corporate clients in IT, Financial Services, and Pharmaceuticals: founder member through to trade sale.
  • – more specifically, 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 founder Katie Donovan-Adekanmbi articulate her personal quest for equality and launch BCohCo – a learning and development consultancy. And, finally, helping writer and founder Sarah McCartney to recognise and act on her love of beauty and scent, alongside her childhood commercial instincts. Sarah launched 4160 Tuesdays London – an artisan perfumery hand making adventurous perfumes whilst counting the number of Tuesdays you have left to live!
  • – For lovers of BALLROOM, I spent several years modelling Paul Harris, an English choreographer, dance teacher and movement director in film, television and theatre. Paul’s credits include Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Entrapment with Catherine Zeta Jones, and John Osborne’s The Entertainer at London’s Old Vic. But my contribution is more modest – I captured Paul’s strategy for learning to dance one step of the Cha-Cha-Cha: The Paul Harris Strategy – published under my name in NLP trade magazine Rapport – is also the basis for Salsa and Merengue – The Essential Step by Step Guide – authored by Paul Harris.
  • The Cha-Cha-Cha project was a gift to myself at the time – I did not want to fall over navigating the corner of a ballroom with a dance partner. Working with Paul, led me to amateur dancers Christopher Hawkins and Hazel Newberry – Three World Titles in Professional Ballroom before retiring at the top.

To add to my first-class practical business experience and curiousity about spirit, I have studied strategy to Master of Business Administration (MBA) level at Ashridge Business School and have extensive certifications in Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). These NLP certifications include Global Training & Consulting alongside Modelling & Epistemology.

And finally, one more time, I developed a strategic decision tool – a traffic lights system – to evaluate project risk at the different levels of analysis. This App – simple, visual and unique – fell out of a joint corporate and business school project looking at market entry.

You can get access if you work with me.

Clarify your thinking, transform your performance.