It’s all character building for this Managing Director

For Anne Smith, part of the Tickety Boo experience is visiting the offices in Dunblane, Central Scotland. On arrival at our 18th century building, Anne, managing director of Keepsafe Storage Centres, likes to remove herself from her Perth office and switch off from all the activity there.

“I like it because it’s completely away from the hub of what’s happening. We close the door,” says Anne, whose company has been operating self storage centres in Scotland for 25 years. And then she switches back on again, this time to address herself and her coaching needs.

Anne sought coaching from Tickety Boo after being impressed by the firm’s sales coaching to Keepsafe staff. One of her big takeaways from her sessions – which happen every month to six weeks – is that “I knew the answers all along.”

Tickety-Boo’s strategy, says Anne, has been to strip away Anne’s layers and extract information she didn’t know was there. “It’s like stripping away the layers from an onion,” says Anne. “Annie doesn’t put ideas into your head. She has an ability to drive it out of you. She finds it in your head.”

After establishing who Anne was, what she wanted her business to be, and how she saw her future, Annie at Tickety Boo concentrated on her. She wanted coaching primarily because of her position as Keepsafe’s managing director. “When you’re the managing director it can be pretty lonely. There are not a lot of people to talk to. You have ideas but you need a sounding board,” says Anne.

Adds Annie from Tickety Boo, who coaches many people in senior management positions:

“Being in a senior position can be a lonely place. You are surrounded by good people and you do trust them, however often you have to deal with highly confidential information and make tough decisions that may have an impact on other peoples lives. Not only that, sometimes you need to remove yourself from everybody’s opinions and just take yourself to a place where you can figure it out for yourself.”

Tickety Boo makes its own office environment as welcoming and comfortable as possible – with armchairs, plants and a relaxed setting. Sometimes, though, clients prefer to get out and do their coaching sessions during a walk or seated on a bench by the river.

Anne from Keepsafe got into the habit of jotting down her observations about her sessions in a notebook, and ideas for how she might shift her work practices as a result. As it turns out, “I knew the answers, but I was not seeing the wood for the trees,” she says.

Did she see a direct effect on business? “Anything that makes an employee better can only help the bottom line,” says Anne, who has put forward two of her Keepsafe managers for their own Tickety Boo coaching sessions as a result.