Contact

We started our business in 1990 and moved to Broadmayne in 1994. Like many people through the 1980s, we were a couple that enjoyed the career opportunities and benefits of a booming ‘Thatcherite’ Britain. We both had ‘corporate’ roles, working long hours, driving company cars and earning good salaries. The niggling question, though, was would we be able to sustain such a lifestyle? We wanted children and we had expectations of the sort of relationship we wanted; both things that we knew would not necessarily fit in easily with the way our careers were developing.

The early signs of recession in the computer industry in the late eighties presented us with our chance. Redundancy packages were on offer as the company Graham worked for wanted to reduce numbers in the U.K. and, in November 1990, he left his American employer to ‘go it alone’ as a consultant. In the same month our son was born, we both left our careers, handed in our company cars and started CONTACT, our consultancy business.

Now, nearly ten years on, we look back on that time as the first real step towards creating a more integrated lifestyle that allows us to combine more successfully the things that are important to us alongside the need to earn a living and raise a family. Why Broadmayne? Well, we soon recognised that it did not matter where we lived now that we were masters of our own destiny, so why not live somewhere we loved rather than somewhere that was close to our work. Dorset and Broadmayne we love!

Our business is consultancy. Our field is management and organisation development. Our office is a room inside our house. Our market is any business, company or organisation that wants some help and our geographical area of operation includes Europe and the U.S.A. We don't employ anyone directly and our most useful asset, apart from our experience and intellectual capital, is our computer! What is management and organisation development? It's about developing the skills, knowledge and attitudes to help people and therefore organisations, to become more effective in whatever arena they believe to be important. Our expertise lies in understanding people and how to help people learn new skills and therefore perform better. Mostly we work to support major change initiatives that businesses are undertaking. We work predominantly in what are known as the ‘soft skills’ – leadership, values, style, change management, coaching and performance management.

But what is likely to be of real interest to the reader of the future? Let’s put down a few of our ideas. Whether our guesses are accurate we’ll never know, though our ‘neighbours of the future’ may be better placed to judge! It may be significant that, as the year 2000 approaches, lifestyles seem to be becoming even more flexible and de-structured. The world of work is dependent increasingly on people’s flexibility and ability to cope with change. Many people we work with do not have offices or bases other than their computer or their car. Men still predominate in senior positions. Will that change in fifty to one hundred years time? Businesses are now going global and are doing it as quickly as possible. The world is smaller and markets increasingly international. People look to earn money from a range of sources and customer service is yesterday's thinking. Customer experience has arrived – the latest mantra! Incidentally, do we all shop from home using ‘virtual reality’ to try on our clothes and how have we overcome the problem of traffic congestion? That's what we'd love to know!

Nicola and Graham Stickland