Taking your business further

Taking your Business Further
Partners: Nicholas White & Ruth White.
Webdesign Daniel Hobson

LEARNING PORTAL

Here at Strato we have more than a quarter of a century’s combined experience at working in the virtual space. We believe that virtual learning has a strong role to play when cost, accessibility or environmental concerns are at the forefront of decision making. In fact, a couple of years ago we decided that the distinction between virtual learning and face to face classroom learning is redundant. We now distinguish between instructor-led learning and self-directed learning.

Even so, many people are only now coming round to the virtual learning environment. Many seem to have been put off by worries about engagement or just dealing with unknown technologies.

A good virtual intervention can be no less engaging than the traditional classroom; it’s down to good design which really focuses on regular, fun and meaningful interactions as much as on the content – and great, inspiring delivery. Despite well-publicised platforms being under a significant strain at the moment we have encountered very few technical issues and certainly none that have been crippling.

We are happy to talk more about our virtual offerings – either delivered under our own banner or with businesses we have close partnerships with.

A sample
from the Business Cycle Series

Our learning portal provides easy access to our bespoke micro-learning videos.

If you would like to know more about how you can access these videos, please get in touch: contact@stratobusinesslearning.com
Access Learning Portal

LET US INTRODUCE OURSELVES

We are a small, UK-based management learning business. Areas of expertise include finance, marketing, people skills/personal awareness and strategy. We work for leading businesses all over the world providing both face to face and virtual solutions, often delivering a blended mixture of approaches and combining subject matter to develop business acumen and business partnering capabilities.

Nick has over 20 years’ experience as a business learning professional, specialising in the development and delivery of financial and business learning at all levels and for all functions in major organisations in over forty-five countries. As well as training face to face in a classroom environment, Nick is a skilled facilitator in the virtual environment and has been delivering virtual programmes for over ten years. He has also had a leading role in the development of e-learning, business simulations and interactive podcasts and has co-authored a book on financial analysis.

Currently based in the UK, Nick has also lived and worked as a trainer in the USA for two years. Prior to becoming a business trainer, he spent nine years working in industry and held a number of Finance and IT positions in the UK and Germany for Reuters, Abbott Laboratories and De La Rue. Before this he qualified as a Chartered Accountant with BDO Binder Hamlyn in London, having previously achieved a BA (Hons) in Engineering Science from the University of Oxford.

Trevor is a seasoned trainer and facilitator. He has 17 years’ experience delivering on a range of subjects in the marketing and innovation learning arena. He has worked for large internationals such as Unilever and Philips, and smaller organisations in both Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) and Business to Business (B2B) markets. Knowledge transfer has mainly been to the marketing and R&D functions - both key players in the innovation process. As well as training face to face in a classroom environment,

Trevor has credentials in the virtual environment too and has been delivering virtual and blended programmes for many years. He also runs live action workshops and has co-authored a book on brands.

Prior to working within training and facilitation, he worked within the advertising and design business in London. Clients here included Vauxhall Motors, The Seychelles Tourist Board and the UK Government – Commission for the New Towns.

An experienced marketing professional, Mike moved into the business learning sector over 20 years ago. Freelance since 2005, he now designs and delivers training and facilitation solutions for a range of multinational companies in both B2C and B2B industries. Mike predominantly focuses on three areas:

• Developing the skills and behaviours of marketers
• Supporting non-marketing managers who need to understand their role within a marketing-oriented organization
• Working with businesses as they adopt a greater degree of customer-orientation.

Mike also facilitates workshops on consumer insight generation, creative thinking, product and concept development.

From his extensive experience of marketing and training, Mike is able to offer a creative, multi-industry perspective to any project in which he is involved. The three pillars of his training approach have always been “Principles, Practice, Progress” – focussing on hands-on learning and then applying the specific behaviours needed to really make the tools work hard in driving a business forward.

Having graduated with a Business Administration degree from Brunel University, Daniel’s initial line of experience was within Marketing, culminating in becoming Group Marketing Manager for the 19 Stratstone Land Rover dealerships across the UK.

Since then he has changed career direction moving into Business Development and has worked with a variety of marketing and media companies. Within this period Daniel concluded a successful management buyout of one of those businesses.

In 2012 he entered the training sector in a Business Development capacity to explore and align the provision of tailored business and financial learning solutions to the needs of high calibre managers of blue chip companies. Working closely with tutors, he has developed a network of contacts within learning, organisational development, human resources and finance roles. Daniel has also supported delivery of learning programmes in particular some of the interactive tutor-led virtual classrooms.

Daniel Hobson is a Graphic Designer and Design consultant with a Masters postgraduate degree in Communication Design. He has a range of skills and experience working on creative and innovative solutions for a growing list of clients from various sectors including; Business, Fashion, Editorial and Higher Education. Specialising in; web design, editorial, branding, typography and photography. 

Daniel also has four years experience as a tutor lecturing in Graphic Arts to undergraduates, in both the UK and in China. He is also a recognised Fellow of the Higher Educational Academy. 

Rebecca is a business learning professional, specialising in designing and delivering tailored business acumen and finance learning solutions for global and local businesses. She has 20 years international experience working with learners at all levels and across functions to drive strategy implementation, build organisation and individual skills, improve decision making and strengthen business performance.

She has a particular interest in sustainable learning design and effectiveness, with strong experience of authoring e-learning, podcasts and self-directed learning materials. She is a skilled facilitator both virtually and face to face and is qualified to deliver SDI tools for understanding and influencing behavioural motives.

During her learning career, she has worked as a freelancer, with a UK based learning consultancy and for the regional and central government in Namibia. Having qualified as a Chartered Accountant with Deloitte in Glasgow and London, Rebecca worked as a corporate tax specialist before moving into business learning.

Mike has extensive experience in developing managerial and leadership capability in a range of operating environments and prevailing organisational cultures providing clients with tailored learning solutions that deliver real and identifiable performance improvement, in areas of:

• Leadership
• Performance Management and Coaching
• High Performance Team-working
• Project Leadership
• Strategy and Organisational Culture Change
• Relationship Sales and Client Management

Mike is a certified INLPTA NLP Practitioner and is accredited to conduct a number of personal style and psychometric assessment tools including the Thomas International PPA, Personal Strengths Publishing Strength Deployment Inventory (SDI) and the MHS Emotional Intelligence EQi 2.0.

Mike also provides 1:1 coaching for people from middle-management level through to senior directors helping individuals address particular issues and challenges, adapt their approach to be more effective in their respective role or in transitioning to new roles and responsibilities.

Mike graduated from Warwick Business School where he specialised in organisational behaviour and marketing and spent his early career in sales and marketing roles, culminating as head of Marketing for Akzo Nobel. Since 2003 Mike has been working with like minded colleagues designing and delivering leadership development programmes for clients in the UK, Europe and North America

WATCH OUR VIDEO

Browse our three animations to learn more about us:

WHAT DO WE DO?

Our core areas of expertise lie in five areas:

Financial learning: +

Marketing / strategy learning: +

Business Acumen: +

People Skills/Personal Awareness: +

Business Partnering: +

We have experience in working with leading players from amongst a wide range of industries including Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG), Technology, Financial Services, Pharmaceuticals, Publishing & Media and Oil, Gas & Chemicals. On top of delivering learning programmes to wider audiences, we have been involved in developing and delivering business programs that are functionally specific to departments such as Finance, Marketing, R&D, HR, Sales and Supply Chain. In addition, we have a specialist area of expertise in delivering finance and business learning for journalists.

OUR PHILOSOPHY

We strongly believe that education of any sort should lead to action and enhanced performance. This is best served by having engaging, supportive learning which that challenges participants in the classroom and which can be applied back in the workplace. Where possible, learning events follow a needs’ based assessment (both at an organisational and individual level) and are supported by a strong evaluation of organisational impact.

Although the bulk of our experience is with large multinationals, we believe that high quality business training should be available to tomorrow’s wealth generators. We are especially interested in working with technology, bio-technology and bio-pharmaceutical companies.

As a small organisation, we believe in collaborating with partners who offer complementary services in order to offer the best path towards mutual benefit. To this end, we partner with organisations and individuals in North America, Europe and Asia and we are keen to expand our range of offerings in new and exciting areas of learning delivery, such as micro-learning. We believe that any collaboration should be open and transparent with a fair division of rewards to match both the inputs and outputs.

We believe that pricing should be value based. As a result, we are always happy to discuss our pricing, which will be driven by the volume of work, nature of the organisation and the type of work. Our aim is to build long term partnerships with our clients and others and we believe that our pricing will always offer good value for money.

SUSTAINABILITY

We believe that we are in a great position to operate as a sustainable business. Much of our training is delivered online, reducing the necessity to travel. In addition, course materials can either be delivered electronically or via the client specific area within our website, thus reducing the requirement for paper copies of materials. In addition, where travel is unavoidable we will aim to offset the carbon impact.

Phone: +44 (0) 7831 758007
E:mail: contact@stratobusinesslearning.com

Partners: Nicholas White & Ruth White.                Website designed by danielhobson.co.uk