QuoLux

08/09/2026

This month’s Innovation Visit saw the GAIN™ delegates at Cosgrove & Drew Ltd in Bristol to see at first-hand some of the drivers behind the growth of the company.

Luke Drew, MD of Cosgrove & Drew hosted the visit and his programme peers didn’t have to look far as Innovation was visible in much of what Cosgrove & Drew do.

It was heartening to see learning from Zac Cosgrove, Cory Greening, Vic Wheeler & Luke’s time on LEAD™, GOLD™ & GAIN™ has been applied. From imaginative use of data through to culture development, much has been achieved in a relatively short period.

There were plenty of insights that we all had to take back to our organisations.

Gareth Edwards CCPCharity
Charles Taylor Taylor and Taylor Care
Adam Padmore Rappor
Abby Guilding WellChild - the national charity for sick children
James Markey Nutrition X
Steve Taylor Frocester Group

We missed you Nicola Bird Bell Contracting Ltd

07/09/2026

When should you bring in a finance director in an SMB? My rule of thumb is 50 to 100 employees, with a financial controller coming in before that.

A good FD supports the chief exec or MD, gets out of their office and coaches financial literacy down through the organisation.

We work with a lot of business people who are at the pivot point and unsure whether to make the hire. Everyone who has done it says the same thing about the difference in the level of data, information and meaning they now get.

Jill Douglas, the interviewer, tells her own story in this clip, starting with 'the bagman' whose role was collecting bags of cash.

Clip 7 of our Know Your Numbers series is on our YouTube channel now, click in the comments below for the link 👇

03/09/2026

Congratulations to Jamie King, senior contracts manager at Snape Contracting on delivering his final presentation from LEADlight today and officially graduating from the programme 🎉

Thank you Andrew Snape, MD, for joining us to hear Jamie present his findings and recommendations that came out of his research project - we look forward to hearing how the actions become implemented across the business.

Well done Jamie on your graduation!

03/09/2026

44% of the people surveyed by Zenger Folkman for Harvard Business Review said that giving negative feedback was stressful or difficult and 21% admitted they avoid it altogether.

Most leaders are never taught how to do it well and are simply expected to cope.

Next week Cohort 27 of LEAD™ take part in their Introduction to Shadowing. Each delegate spends time inside another delegate's business observing leadership, then sits down with that person and gives them feedback on what they saw.

Self-awareness, self-management, empathy and relationship management all shape how that conversation goes. The same is true of the feedback conversations you have in your own business every week.

We've written about how all four work in a real feedback conversation and added in a free 10-step guide to giving constructive feedback to download alongside it.

The link to the article is in the comments below 👇



Pictured here is Cohort 26 at their Introduction to Shadowing back in March 💜

01/09/2026

The Treasury is short of money and the country is short of growth. Our CEO, Dr Stewart Barnes, thinks the same answer covers both, and it is already sitting in the UK business population.

He put the case to a room with policy makers in it, in clip 6 of Know Your Numbers. Employment, productivity and tax receipts come from businesses that take on staff, and in this country that means SMBs.

He then works through, live, what the Treasury would collect if those businesses grew. The number he lands on covers NATO's defence spending ask and repays the National Insurance rise from *that* autumn budget, with no new tax anywhere in it.

Better to hear the arithmetic from him - it takes under three minutes.

Clip 6 of our ten part Know Your Numbers series is live now on our YouTube channel 👇

https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0xZDcD0



QuoLux™ - B Corp Certified

27/08/2026

Most SMBs already have the financial information they need - somebody prepares the management accounts, there is a cash forecast on a spreadsheet somewhere and the year end goes in on time.

Whether anyone outside the finance function reads or understands any of it is another matter.

The financial management techniques are all there too. Investment appraisal, budgeting, working capital management, most of it in software the business is already paying for.

Financial leadership, however, is the work of getting the people who run the business to understand those techniques and use them.

Very few SMBs are short of the tools. What they;re short of is anyone outside finance who has been shown how to use them.

This week's blog is about what this looks like day to day, with four suggestions you could start on this month, link in the comments 👇

26/08/2026

Another excellent visit with GAIN™ delegates discovering the many and varied innovations, improvements and ideas underway and implemented at WellChild.

Big thank you to WellChild - the national charity for sick children SLT for being available & well done to GAIN™ delegates for feeding back your set of findings and recommendations. There is so much learning from hearing what’s going on in a colleague’s organisation that then can be applied in your own.

Abby Guilding WellChild - the national charity for sick children
Charles Taylor Taylor and Taylor Care
James Markey Nutrition X
Nicola Bird KW Bell Group AccXel Construction School
Luke Drew Cosgrove & Drew Ltd
Gareth Edwards CCPCharity

25/08/2026

We track what happens to the businesses whose owners and senior leaders come through LEAD™. Turnover across our alumni businesses grows by an average of 42% while the UK economy remains flat. Average profit growth is 197%, so profit is growing around five times faster than turnover.

That is not a pattern you get from simply selling more - it is what happens when better decisions behind the sales are taken.

Stewart's account of why in our next clip on Developing Financial Leadership comes back to who gets to make those decisions.

B Corps are encouraged to change their memorandum of association so people and planet sit alongside profit, which pushes the big questions out beyond the senior team.

Ask the people running the operation and you find out where the waste is, because they have been working around it for years.

The people, planet, profit framing tends to get read as a trade-off against returns, whereas actually, the evidence points the other way...

Clip 5 of our ten part Know Your Numbers series is live now 👇

https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0xPTkg0

21/08/2026

There's real power in a whole management team learning together and this month we celebrated two teams who've just done exactly that.

The management teams at Severnside Security Ltd and Premiere Kitchens (Cohort 2) have both completed our How-To SkillBuild programme, developing a whole layer of management together over a year or more, applying what they learned back in the business as they went.

When a team learns side by side, they build a shared language - the tricky conversations about performance and behaviour get easier; new habits have time to bed in properly; and people can see where they're heading, which makes a real difference to keeping hold of your talent.

Both companies are already leading and managing differently as a result, from more confident delegation and clearer communication to teams pulling in the same direction. And where that leadership development runs right across an organisation, the business results tend to follow.

When teams grow, businesses grow with them.

The full story of both teams is in our latest newsletter, well worth a read if you're thinking about how to develop your own managers 👇

https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0xM35T0

18/08/2026

65% of small and medium businesses do not have a business plan. Without a plan there is often no board meeting either and the meetings that do happen are management meetings about the tactical and the day to day. So when does anyone in the business get to think past next month?

Malcolm Prowle and I talk about what that costs a business and what a plan built for resilience actually looks like.

Part 4 of Know Your Numbers, roughly two minutes, is here 👉 https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0xHGh30

📢 This is a ten-week series from the launch of Developing Financial Leadership in Small-Medium Businesses, written with Professor Malcolm Prowle.

Each week, one idea from the book.

(Next week: Why purpose-led businesses outperform the market)

📘 Developing Financial Leadership in Small-Medium Businesses is out now in paperback - to buy the book, the link is in the comments.

In this clip from the launch of Developing Financial Leadership in ...