Apex Executive Coaching in Jakarta, Indonesia

"The Key to Continuous Business Improvement"


What is Executive Coaching?

How can businesses overcome challenges or profit from opportunities that require skills outside of a managers’ experience? Where can they get access to the expertise they need to further develop their business?

An effective answer is to seek the assistance of an experienced business coach. A coach is a mentor. Someone who holds you to account, offers support and assists business owners and senior managers to improve the way they grow their business.

An executive coach has knowledge, experience and skills in specific areas and industries and shares this knowledge with you. Typically coaches work with entrepreneurs, independent professionals, business owners and business managers.

Why Coaching?

The purpose of executive coaching is to enable a person to tap into his or her own internal resources in order to reach their full potential. The mentor–mentee relationship requires both skills transfer and counselling.

Coaching includes cultivating the whole person - their values, goals and passions. Well motivated and skilled people improve the bottom line of your business. Executive coaching is therefore a cost effective way to get the best out of your staff so that profits are maximised.

Who Benefits from Coaching?

“Executive coaches are not for the meek. They’re for people who value unambiguous feedback. All coaches have one thing in common; it’s that they are ruthlessly resultsoriented.” -- Fast Company Magazine.

Almost anyone can benefit from working with an executive coach, as long as they are committed to personal and professional development. It is suitable for junior managers through to the most senior directors and owners within a business. Depending on the subject, coaching will include one-on-one meetings, upskilling sessions and phone or email communication.

The Coach’s Role

A coach’s role is to listen, to counsel and to discuss with business owners and managers to assist in further developing their skills and capacity. A coach will usually begin by looking at the whole business to make sure they fully understand how it works. He will then, together with the client, identify a particular project or isolate key business problems before working out a range of possible approaches.

When the coach and the person being coached have decided on what actions to take, the coach will guide them through a seven-step implementation process. Personal and professional development is rarely successful without the support of other people. A coach is someone who can give feedback, question, discuss, challenge, comfort and guide.

A coach’s role is to listen, to counsel and to discuss with business owners and managers to assist in further developing their skills and capacity. A coach will usually begin by looking at the whole business to make sure they fully understand how it works. He will then, together with the client, identify a particular project or isolate key business problems before working out a range of possible approaches.

When the coach and the person being coached have decided on what actions to take, the coach will guide them through a seven-step implementation process. Personal and professional development is rarely successful without the support of other people. A coach is someone who can give feedback, question, discuss, challenge, comfort and guide.

Five reasons why you should engage an executive coach:

1 Develop the skills you already have and learn new skills

2 Explore your strengths and weaknesses and gain insight into yourself and the people you work with

3 Discuss have a safe place to offload problems, while receiving unbiased, confidential support

4 Gain fresh perspectives on your issues as well as receiving advice, suggestions and options. Create new ways to approach old problems.

5 Create outstanding bottom line outcomes for your business; get the best out of your staff and find new business avenues and untapped potential

To find out more about The Apex Consulting Group and our Executive Coaching Services visit:

http://www.apex-cg.com/eng/mainservices3.php

With kind regards,
PT The Apex Consulting Group

“We Help Our Clients Capture the Inches…”

In this 8-minute video, you’ll hear an overview of a number of recent projects completed by The Apex Consulting Group.

The presentation was recorded at a recent Breakfast Briefing at the Mercantile Athletic Club, Jakarta in November 2008 which was delivered by Simon G. Bell, a Senior Consultant and Partner with The Apex Consulting Group.

The presentation covers five recent projects conducted by Apex and our teams including:

• Technical Training for the Banking Industry
• Business Improvement with Cocoa Growers
• Executive Coaching for the Manufacturing Sector
• Strategic Planning for Finance Institutions
• Corporate Restructuring in the Cement Industry

The Presentation also outlines our Value Proposition in a simple, straight forward manner so viewers can understand where we add value to our clients.

As stated in the Presentation we are convinced our value is fundamentally based on two areas of business support:

1) Executive Coaching and Upskilling: We improve the competency of your key people and provide a focusing force to ensure you maintain your commitment to improvement and excellence

2) Management Consulting: We provide objective advice and practical solutions that assist you to overcome your major business challenges

The Presentation also mentions Apex’s Business Diagnostic Process:

To find out more about The Apex Consulting Group or to set up an appointment with one of our Engagement Managers contact our offices on +62 21 515 7792.

NB: To learn more about Simon G. Bell’s background and experience visit his LinkedIn profile at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/simongbell

With kind regards,
The Apex Consulting Group
http://www.apex-cg.com/

Professional Services in the Business World

Buy and Sell or Build a Mutually Beneficial Relationship?
By Colin Paroz

More and more we seem to be a society that likes things in nice neat packages. It might be the hamburger and fries that look taste and smell the same every time no matter the location. It might be those exact 30 minute bites of television that so many of us can’t live without or the 10 second grab from a politician that we use to form our political opinions and biases. This phenomenon seems to be spreading to the business world. I attribute the explosive growth of franchises and similar arrangements over the last decade to this trend. After all what is a franchise but a ready to run operation or "a business in a box"? It is also spreading to our professional service providers.

We can buy "accounting solutions" for our annual income tax returns, we have fixed price conveyancing, and for business advisers and management consultants, we are used to buying hourly or daily lumps of time. We sometimes have a focus on the process measure (time) rather than the desired outcome.

Some consumers of professional services have adopted the three quotes approach to selecting a provider. This is probably done with the belief that professional services are a commodity, in other words the product will be the same regardless of vendor. This approach works well for homogenous product groups such as electrical appliances or similar brand motorcars.

Things start to become more complex with unique products such as professional services. The business solution that I provide to a client for their needs will be different to those offered by my competitors. My clients must decide if my solution or product offering is suited to their needs. Only then can we discuss price and this discussion should be founded on the anticipated value of the outcomes.

When considering the procurement of a traded service we must look beyond apparent cost and consider the three financial aspects of the product-based relationship, price, value and risk. Let’s consider each of these in a little more detail.

Price should be considered as a short-term outlay which is to be spent with the expectation that there will be a return within a given period of time. Like most investments, it is reasonable to expect that the more we spend the greater the return on the investment.

Value is a measure of the return on the outlay. If you spend $ 50 000 on management consulting services, then you expect to get a bottom line return significantly greater than this. In simplest terms the value is the difference between the cost and the return. When considering professional service offerings a purchaser must avoid the temptation of simply comparing cost with cost and make the extra effort to evaluate the expected return on the initial outlay. Often a little more spent upfront will result in a significant yield later on.

The final consideration is risk. That is, the risk of not receiving the promised outcome. Consider the following example. You want to engage a professional service provider to design and install a management information system. Your expectation is that the package will cost you around $100000. You receive two proposals, one for $110000 and one for $20000. Which is the more attractive? Considered on price alone the decision is simple, but once we take risk of failure into account then the more expensive option probably offers far greater value for money.

A strategic and whole of organisation decision needs to be made regarding the procurement of goods and services. That decision is "do we buy on cost or value?" This applies as much to professional services as it does to goods and other products.

It is easy to focus on price as there is no need to really understand the product offering. There is also a short-term benefit in taking the cheapest price. Sophisticated consumers of professional services understand that value and price are not necessarily connected and risk minimisation is often a sound investment

So far we have considered the purchasing of professional services. What about those of us who sell professional services? For me, the message is clear. We are not necessarily in a price sensitive market. We must work with our clients to deliver value for money and demonstrate how we will maximise the probability of project or assignment success.

Is it possible to synthesise a mutually beneficial approach from both the buyers and sellers perspective? I believe the answer is yes provided the relationship is founded on mutually understood needs and expectations and value based outcomes that carry the maximum probability of success.

So, I leave you with this nice neat little package of thought on the matter of buying and selling professional services. 0f course, in the real world, its not necessarily that simple, but in our ordered world of high speed consumption, it will do for the moment!

Colin is a Senior Consultant with The Apex Consulting Group. To learn more visit our website at www.apex-cg.com

With kind regards,
The Apex Consulting Group