1. What have you found most challenging as a leader of a small or medium enterprise?

Funding.

2. How did you become a leader of an SME? Can you please briefly tell the story?

My ancestors have been entrepreneurs for four generations. The environment I grew up in made me the way I am.

3. How do you structure your work days from waking up to going to sleep?

Yoga or Weight Training followed by Breakfast.

Tap dance to work or work from home.

Focusing on growth and innovation as well as marketing and customer delight.

Evenings with close family with close friends occasionally joining.

4. What's the most recent significant leadership lesson you've learned?

Leave them alone. And they'll come home. Bringing their tails behind them.

5. What's one book that has had a profound impact on your leadership so far? Can you please briefly tell the story of how that book impacted your leadership?

The Goal

Changed my life. Opened me to the theory of constraints and taught me realism whilst reinforcing that the only worthwhile goal is perfection even though it can never be attained. It's the journey that matters.

6. How do you build leadership capacity in an SME?

Very deliberately. By giving trust and respect. By training and then letting go. By nurturing an environment of belonging. By never going over anybody's chain of command. By demanding excellence. By insisting that leaders are teachers. By evaluating leadership success on how the leaders team members grew.

7. What is one meaningful story that comes to mind from your time as a leader of an SME so far?

Nothing brings people together like adversity. The COVID 19 pandemic threatened our very existence for about five months. We were locked down. Producing nothing. Facing cancellations and deferrals in our order book. Our managers and staff took voluntary pay cuts ranging from 25 to 90% so that we could pay our particularly vulnerable workforce and live to tell the tale. We are stronger than ever today and climbing out of the trough the pandemic pushed us into.