Morag Freathy, Managing Director B&I, Compass Group

Business and Industry within Compass Group remained operational during the Covid pandemic of 2020. The leadership team leveraged their skills to protect the business, teams, clients and consumers during this time. However, after a relentless 10 months we felt it time to pause and reflect as leaders and check-in on how we could hone our leadership skills for the future. A good time to reset the dial ready for the ‘New Normal’. As a senior leadership team we undertook a 6 module training programme in Agile Leadership. Joe was absolutely fantastic on every count; from managing a group of people virtually through to the course content and personalisation of the course. The feedback and output has been fantastic from all of my team and has left us reflecting on how we can be better every day. We know the programme has resonated as we find ourselves replaying our learnings and quoting new found knowledge on a daily basis.

I would like to say a huge thankyou to Joe for developing this course – it’s been a great success.

Tracy Rawnsley, L&D Manager, Compass Group UK&I

Sometimes in a busy world,  leaders don’t always find the time to reflect on their leadership approach and the impact it has on others. Leadership responses become hardwired and behaviours become “the way we do things around here”. That doesn’t make it right, just accepted. Joe helped our senior leadership team look at themselves as individuals and as a team and recognise what they could do to build their leadership strengths for the future. Joe designed an innovative programme of workshops that helped develop some of the most highly desired leadership qualities of trust, empowering employees to thrive and improve through a sense of connection and belonging and nurturing growth by bringing out the best in people.

Working with Joe has brought renewed energy and passion to our leadership thinking. The momentum and desire for leadership learning that Joe created has been infectious and after reading Joe’s favourite book “Busy” by Tony Crabbe, we hope that desire will never be extinguished. If you haven’t had a conversation with Joe about how she can support your leadership development, then make contact and start your leadership transformation today.

Member of The Association of Business Psychology

Joanne is a member of The Association of Business Psychology, who promote professional excellence and a community of practice in business psychology.

Emma Little, Events & Promotions Manager, Benefit Cosmetics

Presenting to Influence with Impact by The Progress Lab is such a fantastic course! It gave me a real boost in confidence and provided me with some great transferable skills, it was so useful and I have taken away so many learnings! I would absolutely recommend this course to anyone who is looking to improve their confidence and who want to take their presentation skills to the next level.

Arash Khosravi, Snr Data & Performance Analyst, Coram-i

A colleague recommended this Presenting to Influence with Impact course to me.   The content and style was excellent – Joe kept the whole room engaged and gave very informative and specific feedback to each person on their presenting and both what they did well and what could be improved.  The pre-work was particularly helpful and Joe made sure to cover all the aspects that I was looking to improve on. Joe also sent through specific feedback to us based on our presentations on the day which was an extremely useful to have on paper and to work on after the course.

The course came at a perfect time for me as I was in the process of preparing for a presentation to 50 young people. Joe was very happy to speak with me after the course and gave me useful tips and techniques to get the audience engaged. I managed to apply a lot of the techniques Joe taught in the course to this presentation and I received very good feedback as to how the presentation went which wouldn’t have been the case without Joe’s helpful insight and suggestions.

The Progress Lab is doing exceedingly good work and what I’ve learnt I will be taking forward with me throughout my career. I would highly recommend them – thank you Joe!

Harriet Gill, Managing Director Coram Life Education

Coram Life Education is a charity with dreams and ambitions, but consists of a small team with limited resources. Our key stakeholders are school purchasers, and an affiliated network of local partners delivering wellbeing education to primary schools across the UK. Our team design programmes and products to meet the needs of our stakeholders, and they in turn have high standards and expectations of us.

Joanne was recommended to us by the Coram Group of charities, as we prepared to launch paid-for products, new resources and merchandise, and a refreshed website with the aim of extending our position in the education market. Joanne gained knowledge and insight into our organisation with great speed, presented her observations clearly and worked with key staff to translate our ideas into a realistic and exciting plan of action. She lifted the weight off our shoulders, and showed great resourcefulness in her pursuit of solutions.

Joanne and the Progress Lab deliver the goods and are accountable, diligent, client-centred and optimistic during the process. They are SMART in every sense of the word!

Martin Pratt, CEO of The Association of Child & Adolescent Mental Health (ACAMH)

Joanne came to us via peer recommendation and in short we haven’t looked back. Joanne has a sharp intellect, is analytical,  client focused, supportive and above all not concerned about challenging convention, stimulating debate and ultimately achieving consensus.

Joanne has successfully leveraged the very diverse range of capabilities and experience of ACAMH staff, Board and Branch committee members to develop and help kickstart the implemention of exciting and transformative 3-year marketing plan that incorporates amongst other achievements a new website, a refresh of our existing brand, a well thought out member engagement strategy and the recruitment of a new team of staff.

Joanne’s focus on our success and the building of a long lasting and trusting relationship was apparent from our first meeting over coffee and has not let up as we reach the end of our period of working with her.

Huge enthusiasm and energy from start to finish. I recommend Joanne without reservation.

Von Sy, Founder of Nimble Babies

We have been running our own marketing activities in the first 9 months of the launch of Nimble Babies Milk Buster but we realize that we have to up our game because we finally got a major high street baby retailer with 75 stores in the UK who listed our product. It was time to take our marketing seriously because we were worried to lose the listing if our product doesn’t take off.

I met up with 7 other marketing agencies and was about to give up on the idea until I met The Progress Lab. I was very happy after our first meeting because they understood the needs of building a brand strategy for a startup company like ours, rather than just executing marketing activities for you. They spent time understanding the brand personality we wanted to create and our long term business objectives.

So after that first meeting, we decided to work together and in just 3 months of working together, I can really see the improvement in both the quantity and quality of our reach to our target customers. Our FB following has grown 4X and website visits by 2X. In addition we’ve created new and exciting marketing assets that we are using everywhere on our social media activities, communications with retailers and in our  investor meetings. We are also able to develop a clearer brand positioning for Nimble Babies which will give us great foundation for even better marketing activities in the next few months.

Overall, thoroughly enjoyed working with The Progress Lab and would highly recommend them.

Hashim Yilmaz, General Manager – Summer Infant Europe

At Summer Infant, we have a great range of innovative baby essentials, but we really wanted to start to build our brand equity with our UK consumers.  As we are a lean team, we wanted to have some marketing resource who we knew could get the job done with little management time taken up, so the idea of The Progress Lab’s Virtual Marketing Team suited us perfectly.  In a short space of time, the team has developed marketing campaigns that have really engaged with our target consumers, we are thrilled to be building our Facebook following at more than 1k new fans a month and we have great launch plans in place for our new products coming to market later this year.

Joe and Ruth are great to work with, they are full of energy and so committed to getting the job done and making a difference, they are constantly coming up with new ideas to raise our brand profile.  I couldn’t recommend them highly enough.

Valerie Fry, Director of Licensing – Coolabi

Our team really enjoyed doing The Art of Prioritisation training session with The Progress Lab.
Our group was a mix of people from different functions across the business, yet everyone felt like they got something out of it because the course provided “bite size chunks” covering a range of different prioritisation methods.

Joe was very energetic in her delivery, encouraged a lot of audience participation and kept everyone engaged and interested.  The section on email efficiency resonated with a lot of our team and I am personally  already exercising some of the tips and techniques we learnt about.  I would definitely recommend this course to other teams, not only to help with productivity but also as a good team building session.

Laura Cooper, HR Manager SMP

‘The Art of Prioritisation workshop offered great content at a good pace. Joanne was energetic, engaging and friendly and having worked in our industry for a long time was aware of the issues we faced. We will definitely look to use Joanne for our further training requirements in the future.’

Mark Owers, CEO CVAA

We were delighted to secure Joe’s involvement with the Governments £13m expansion grant programme for the voluntary adoption sector in England. As the Grant Advisory Board Marketing Expert her insights have been invaluable – she has transformed the way the sector thinks about marketing and brand development. Joe has been the driving force in helping the sector to see the benefits of having ‘one voice’ and maximising economies of scale and minimising duplication. And as well as having bucket loads of ideas and energy, she is a really good person to work with

Marcia Samuels, CEO NCY Trust

Joanne Gray became my mentor in March 2013. We have regular meetings where Joe has been able to help me unpack the madness of areas across life in general, work, dreams and aspirations. Joe is extremely supportive and has been a guiding influence through some tough periods and decisions. Joe is committed, consistent and caring without getting sucked into the emotions of the situation. Joe works with what you bring but is able to see the bigger picture and make connections that you may not have thought of. Joe encourages and pushes me out of my comfort zone on a professional and personal basis and I feel very privileged to have had her for nearly two years as my mentor.