Episode 37 | Facing Big Challenges in Growing a Business - Leanne Bonner-Cooke, Founder of e-bate LTD

Today we talk with Leanne Bonner-Cooke, the founder of e-bate LTD, which provides Rebate Management Solutions. 

Leanne shares her story of leaving her corporate consultancy role to start her first business and what she learnt from this experience. We talk about having the right vision, strategy and values in place in your business so that you can use this as a target and evaluate progress against it in order to keep driving forwards and push through tough times to achieve the vision. In addition to knowing your vision, it's the ability and importance of communicating this to everyone in your team.

We go beyond talking about vision and discuss how to evaluate if this is the right vision, based on where your business is vs the competition - is the strategy correct? And appreciating that whilst we are a team everyone is also on their own journey. It's about getting buy-in from the team and breaking down the overall vision into objectives for each team and how that translates into specific KPIs for each team member. 

Leanne also shares her views on the importance of looking outside of the business, both for new team members, to recruit individuals who share the same values and attitude you hold as a business but also for support, mentorship and networking, to help you grow as an individual.

 

Leanne shares a very personal story of how she was diagnosed with cancer, yet still had funding to complete, a team to support and a business to run and the resulting worries that arose from this.  A really helpful piece of advice was shared, that will help others in challenging situations.

To wrap things up, Leane shares her key pieces of advice for aspirational leaders and business owners: 

- remember to focus on the health of the business and your vision - it's your responsibility,

- try not to instruct others, but inspire them,

- the importance of adapting and continuous professional learning.

A big thank you Leanne, for sharing your learnings throughout your journey of setting up and running multiple businesses, in addition to the major personal challenges you've overcome. All of which  showed insights into your resilience and leadership.

 

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The podcast is brought to you by Rebecca and Callum Jenkins and sponsored by RJEN - helping companies to achieve high-performance growth.