You're at the Coaching Inn, 3D Coaching's virtual pub where we enjoy conversations with people who engage in the world of coaching. Welcome to this week's edition of The Coaching Inn. I'm your host, Claire Pedrick. And before I introduce you to today's guest, let me just invite you to subscribe or follow so that you could get every podcast as it drops every week. So today in The Coaching Inn, it's my pleasure to be in the company of David Roche. Hello. David is, hello, hello.
David is all sorts of things and... former CEO, a coach, a mentor, an author, a book industry board. But we're going to find out all about David as we talk. Welcome, David. Thank you very much. Just say it's Roche as in coach, very appropriately, the pronunciation. Not Roche as in drug company. No, no, I wish it was. I ever fly through Zurich, I do pretend it is Roche because you get treated like royalty if you're in Switzerland. David Roach the coach.
Nobody in our listenership is ever going to forget that. I did think of putting that as the company name at one point, never got there. David Roach the coach. Yeah. That sounds like a children's book, doesn't it? That was that was the problem. So David, David Roach, coach. I'd love to hear about all your journeys. Just tell us a bit about the the the CEO bit and the industries that you've worked in. As we begin.
Basically, I've worked in in retail for I guess the best part of 20 years beginning my career and I had worked it for a menswear company in sort of production planning and stock management and merchandising. then eventually I ended up joining HMV as operations manager. So I hadn't worked in a store at HMV, so I came in straight into head office. And that was quite unusual. It was traditionally a bottom ground up sort of company. And I worked for them for a number of years as operations manager.
I did a major sort of project management job, which was seen as a bit of a hospital pass. It was a massive systems project to change everything. But it was very important because it allowed them to expand much faster. It's quicker to put systems in place than it is to train managers to actually do everything, including all the buying in their stores. So it did allow us to expand and become number one ahead of likes of Virgin and R-Price and Smiths and all the other Woolworths.
And I learned a lot of skills from that project management role working across departments. which I think stood me in good stead for general management later on. And as a result of that, I was made, I've put on the board as product director, was like some buying and trade marketing director. And then after a few years of doing that, I moved across to Waterstones, which was a sister company under the HMV group to do the same thing there. And I sort of fell in love with publishing.
at that point, rather more than the retailing side. I became president of the Booksellers Association, which was nice and dealt with it and liaised with a lot of publishers at that point. And then I moved on to join the American chain Borders who bought books, etc., which was primarily Southeast based chain and then expanded with their Superstore format.
through the UK and Ireland and then managed the sale for the Americas of that company and then left because I could see that it wasn't going to get the investment it needed and it was going to be milked for cash, which is not something I wanted to be part of.
And then sort of poach-a-turn Gamekeeper, a distant consultancy for Harp Collins Publishing and ended up being taken on to implement the plan that I'd come up with and that they then accepted they needed to do in terms of some major reorganization. And I worked there for a few years and then left and since then I've done a lot of consultancy. I've also done some literary agency.
I've had two books published, so I've done really every sort of job across the publishing side in the books industry and had a little bit of understanding of everything. And in my book, I talk a lot about specialism v generalism. And I think that I'm a classic example of someone who's a generalist who has gone through the sort of paranoia of, my God, I'm a jack of all trades up, but I'm a master of none. What's my specialist skill? I don't bring any.
But actually, this is a mistake that a lot of generalists have, because being a generalist is a specialist skill in its own right. And when it comes into being a CEO or into a very senior position, you actually need to have that wider view and that interest, wider interest in order to be able to incorporate everyone's ideas and bring everything together like a conductor for an orchestra. now I do more non-exec stuff than consulting. I still do some consulting, but I chair London Book Fair.
I chair the writing agency New Writing North who develop writers across the north of England and run the Durham Book Festival and several awards. I trained about five years ago to become a professional coach. And I have a few slots where I coach generally first time CEOs, one aspiring CEO for a big corporate. and I wrote, had this book published in, this book published in, become a successful first time CEO in March this year.
And it's really a sort of, it's a little bit of my journey to learn from where I got things wrong, but it tries to be full of stories, full of anecdotes, not just from me, but from other CEOs who've been along the way.
really are the sort of things that might have helped if if I if I you know if back then you knew what you know now it's trying to to put across those sort of ideas of going actually what seems to be terribly unfair is just it's just something you've misunderstood and and actually often it's a communication thing and as a coach now I think I'm like an adapter between a European pin plug and a UK socket.
sometimes in communication, because people are saying something, but the person on the other side of table is hearing something completely different and looking for something completely different. So it tries to be helpful. my happiest thing is that someone described it as a, said not many business books can pull off being a genuine page turner, which I thought was the best compliment you could possibly get as a lot of I'm not a massive business book fan.
So I think this is for people who like to learn through stories rather than bullet points. Yeah. Yeah, it's a train reader. It's a train reading book, isn't it? That's got lots of really useful stuff in it, but Andy's compelling enough to want to keep reading it. You obviously haven't read my business book because... people describe it like that too. Business books that people can read. It could be a niche, couldn't it?
You should have a thing at the London Book Fair about business books people can read. So I'm fascinated, David, because as we're talking, you've got books on one side of you, you've got music on the other side, and then you've got a gold disc behind you. So what's the gold disc for? I don't like to talk about my boy band past. Working for HMV for many years as bio-director, a few things were thrown your way. I think that actually is from HMV for 10 years service.
It was quite a thing they used to do to people at conferences, is dish out, dish out a gold disc. But you can pretend it's a boy band thing. I have lots of discs up on the walls, you can see. my goodness. It's full of them. Many discs. So I'm really interested in this specialist generalist thing because my sense is that now you're coaching, that's really the best bit that you bring to the place, is it? Yeah, I think not just for coaching.
One of the reasons I looked at coaching courses and the qualification in the first place. When I left HarperCollins about 12 years ago, I looked at coaching and I went, you know, the pure skills of coaching of only asking questions as your as your taught at the very beginning. I totally understand the reasons for that. I totally understand the ownership and so on so forth. But it wasn't where I was at that time. I thought I had a lot more to offer on the consultancy side.
So that so I parked that for a while. And it was only five years ago as I was becoming a chair of a couple of companies that I went, hang on, I need to take this non-exec director side more seriously. I did do non-exec director course at the Institute of Directors, but that tells you, that's really designed to frighten you into realizing you are just as culpable and responsible as the exec directors, if anything goes wrong, and that you can be struck off as a director if you transgress.
But what it did, the coaching side I thought was really interesting. Moving from being an exec director, and certainly in retail companies, there's a lot of urgency. You get a report every day in terms of sales or how you're doing. If something isn't going well, you need to change it fast. Massive difference to publishing, which works in sort two or three year cycles of acquisition, editorial, design, production, distribution to bookshops in the old model.
But even so, the exact imperatives of getting things done and sometimes telling people what to do and how to do it is very different from the coaching philosophy. But it's actually quite close to the non-exec and chair side, that idea of challenge, that idea of support, that idea of asking the right questions. mean, to a certain extent, put the book that CEO's job is to ask the best questions rather than necessarily having all the answers.
But certainly as a non-exec director, that's even more important. And I found doing the coaching course was massively helpful in being a chair. And then... but like everything else, the, the, think they describe it when you're doing the coaching course, it's a bit like a driving, taking a driving test and, and you do your mirror signal, maneuver, compulsory, stuff until you pass, until you pass and got your qualification.
And then everyone finds their own style that they come to win, which, which is sort of winding down the window and having your elbow on the, on the door. and I found. myself and I think this is where the generalism comes in, that combination of coaching and mentoring in areas where you're really experienced with is much more powerful. Particularly with CEOs, they're very busy people.
They don't have necessarily the time to sit there and be asked the question and with repeated questions and then endless loops of silence to try and when all the all the best stuff comes out after you think everything's come out already. Yeah, great in theory, but if the CEO is sitting there going, look, I've got a meeting in 20 minutes, I really need to bounce something off. Sometimes cutting to the chase is helpful and is what they want rather than necessarily just having the questions asked.
Having that, having the experience, having that breadth of being of a sort of helicopter view is useful, I found when coaching. Yeah, yeah, and I'm sure that's the feedback that you get from your people. So. You may not choose to disclose this, in which case, but I'm just interested. What are your packages with COs? Do you do residual coach, retain coaching? Yeah, I do. do a bit of both. mean, generally I'll say let's work together for a period of time.
And I try and be flexible on, you know, I might put a cap on the number of sessions that that might include, but As I say, CEOs are busy people. I've never known anyone come close to the cap. So that's really there as a safety rail, which is not really required, but it sends a signal. But I find actually, if everyone says go weekly, that can slip because week can go like that. And there's not a lot you can do to change or take things on board. So it tends to be fortnightly.
And I think it's quite important to keep keep things going and not let things slip beyond that because you want some momentum. And I always offer a retainer type, a bat phone I call it, arrangement where they can call me at any time during that period with specific question or a specific issue. It's more of a three minute conversation to go, I'm thinking about doing that, can you see any downside in that or whatever it might be.
And then if we decide that after X months or a year or whatever period, that's fine for the moment, I try and put in place a retainer which says, keep the back phone thing in place in case, but also I'll check in on you every six months, whatever it might be and do an MOT to check how you're doing. Are you still on course? Is there anything that specifically you need realigning on or need help with. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, and that's that's encouraging them to become independent, but leaving a line there in place. I love the bat zone analogy. For those of you who don't know, that's from Batman the movie. God, think it's Batman the TV series from the Batman TV series in the 70s. was thinking, but there we go. Yeah, I guess it depends how old your first time CEOs are, doesn't it? Yeah, it tends to tend to be a bit younger than that.
So I love that this book brings together the CEO, the coach and the book industry man. How did you choose your publisher?
The sort of secondary thing I did after I coached, got my coaching qualification and had a few years coaching under my belt, I was put in touch with Daniel Priestley, who is a serial entrepreneur and basically, He runs several companies, but he's really commercial, incredibly pragmatic and runs and was running this course called Dent's company, KPI course, Key Person of Influence. And it was about how it was really for entrepreneurs to scale up their business.
And I didn't really, I wasn't the typical sort of type company who they tend to be much younger at start, but also they want to take their business from X million, X hundred thousand to X million. And I really just wanted to have some ideas about being more commercial with the coaching business, developing it and marketing it in ways that might be slightly different from the way I've been thinking before. And I learned so much off him.
He was great because he was one of those people who like if you're in a company and you're and you've got an advertising agency pitching to you, you always get someone who, know, the founder of the company or whatever, the CEO who's absolutely brilliant at pitching comes along, wows everybody, they get the business and then you never see the person again.
Whereas this guy, he was great when you were signing up for the course, he would do an open Zoom session with however many people wanted to talk. And I asked him that exactly that question. He went, no, no, no. And sure enough, it was a year long course and he did at least half the lectures and discussions himself. At the same time, starting two companies during that year, both of which go on to massive success.
He also, and he bought a publisher called Rethink Press, who specialize in business books. And one of his pillars of becoming a successful business, he thinks, and why I was interested in him, in the early stages, it's all about you as a person, as the brand, rather than the company. And if you're a coach, that's it, you are the brand, you're the only source. In my case, I'm the sole employee.
And I really liked, what he was saying about that in that if you're the brand, you need to have a presentation or a story to tell that you can do in a nutshell, but it's a brochure, PowerPoint, whatever it might be that sums up your story, you can get people to sign up and get an idea of what you're like. You need a book because that gives you credibility and... And but the book is a business card. It's not there as a sales tool in so many ways.
And the rethink press have a better sort of cost model to allow you to do that. Then if you you go to a traditional publisher and even get an advance, you'd never it would be incredibly expensive to do that model of giving those books away because they might charge you even charging your cost would be or charging you. an author, as an author, it would still be really good. Plus also, what's interesting, they also run a have a company called score app.com, where you can set up quizzes.
Very, very simply in an hour or two yourself, which which are like introductions that are you ready to be a first time CEO, take the quiz and find out. And then you can structure the quiz however you like. So I structured it the same, the first one in same way as the book, where the first bit's about you, yourself, the second bit's about how you deal with all your internal contacts, the third bit's about external contacts, media, the wider industry, your position in that.
And then you can tailor, it produces an automatic report, depending on how you answer, where you script nine versions of this. report depending on how people have answered. So three different versions for each section. And actually it's quite amazing and people sit and go, my God, you know, they know exactly what I'm thinking. And the more you learn to use it, the more you can flex it. So you have a multiple choice of all the trigger points where people are going, my God, that's me.
my God, that's me. my God, that's me. So you have this sort of triangle of contacts and If you come across someone who's taken the score app, you get their data. You send them a free copy of the book, invite them to see one of your presentations. If you see someone on a presentation, can invite them to take the score app and then send a free copy of the book. So you go round the triangle and then you have that.
you have at least three areas of contact, which builds credibility and trust and so on and so forth before you've even started. With the score app, when you have your first introductory session to discover whether you want to work with each other, you already well ahead of the game because you understand exactly where their pinch points are, what their concerns are, the size of company they work for, and so on and so forth.
So again, that's a really meaningful conversation rather than tell me what your problems are or tell you what you want help with. So they've got a quite nice infrastructure. where they have this company, the Score app company, the publisher.
They've also just, interestingly, they're setting up, they're just launching today, in fact, a new company called, I think, Book Magic, which incorporates AI for business book writing, not in terms of the content, but in terms of structure, how to do research and that side of things, which is quite interesting.
I'm sure it will do quite well because... I think the idea of writing business books is, I think everyone can see, yeah, I would like to have done it, but those of us who have written it, I'm sure you all agree, have written one, it's easier said than done. Absolutely. Yeah, somebody asked me the other day how I wrote my books and I said you don't really want to know because it is very random.
Because I just write bits and then in the end it kind of comes together in a in a shape and then I put it in the shape and then decide that wasn't the shape after all it needs to be a different shape. Everyone, mean the thing is, my book's all about relationships and there's no right or wrong answer in relationships which makes it timeless and means I don't have to have the answers because It's a why-to book rather than a how-to book, as editor described it.
I think how you write books is very similar. There's no right answer and what works for you is the right answer. I was actually really disciplined, which is quite unlike me. Did you have a deadline? I sort of agreed a deadline with the publisher. And I was very lucky because my wife's from Finland and we've got a summer cabin in the middle of lakes in the middle of nowhere. So we arranged to go there. And I wrote for four hours every day in the morning.
And I'd already come up with a structure, once I had understood the structure, I have this thing in the book called the CEO Winners Circle, which looks at yourself in the middle, managing upwards your direct reports, the wider company, and then the external suppliers, partners and clients, wider industry and media. And once I sort of understood that structure and how it was divided into three, then it sort of naturally fell. And then...
Rethink Press are very good at helping people who write to write business books who haven't written books before. And they have a sort of tool which went right. If you've got stories or anecdotes from other people or whatever, where would they fit? And it's almost like a post-it. It's a sort of digital post-it thing going, right, these stories, these belong here. These are things I've learned from my coaching experience that are my USP that go top to the rest.
And actually sitting there going, great, I've now got a sort of story in every single section and whatever. And I like to kick off, think just about every chapter starts off with a story, whether that's mine or, the book begins with Guy Gomer, who, for those who saw the clip, would never forget it. Guy Gomer was someone who turned up for an interview at BBC Television House and his interview was, for a job in the IT department.
And they mixed him up in reception with a guy called Guy Cuney, who was the editor of a very high-powered specialist magazine. And they dragged him out into the BBC News 24 studio, plonked him on the chair, and mic'd him up, and off they went, and live on TV. And he was sitting there going, is this how they do interviews for IT and BBC? Amazing. But then they asked him, they asked him. They introduced him as someone else and his face was absolutely pitchy as it suddenly hit him.
my God. They think of someone else. But then they asked him his opinion on the ruling between the Apple Core and the Apple Music that was given, there was a legal ruling the day before. And he sort of went, I don't know. But then got into it, the swing of it. Like, again, showing my age, Peter Sellers in the film being there, he... sort of geniusly, through no knowledge whatsoever, managed to stumble his way through and sound a bit quite plausible and improved by the end.
But he suffered from something that coaches will be very familiar with, that sort of fear of being found out, which I think is prevalent, certainly in first-time CEOs. They come looking very polished and wearing a suit of armour, but underneath, that's not necessarily how they're feeling at all. because they need the support that really isn't there. My theory, and it's backed up by the likes of McKinsey, is that the transition into becoming a first-time CEO is very, very badly mishandled.
think McKinsey quote, a trillion dollars they estimate is lost from standard and poor's 1500 companies in the US on the basis of poorly managed transitions for CEOs and C-suite appointments, that's a trillion dollars a year is lost. And everything's on the selection, it's crazy. The most important person in the company for the future of it is just left to hang out and dry on the basis of just not being given that insurance policy and sort of help.
to try and guarantee success by providing a coach, independent coach. Very weird. I love your passion. I genuinely do. I'm very passionate about it. I really believe it should be compulsory for first-time CEOs to be assigned an independent professional coach and mentor. Why wouldn't you? Who's sitting there going, I don't want this person to Maybe one of direct reports who thought they should have got the job. Maybe they're the ones saying, I hope he doesn't succeed.
But actually everyone else should be doing everything possible to try and ensure that your success, because every employee's livelihood and their family's livelihood can depend on the successful tenure of that CEO and therefore the company. Yeah. And leadership, leadership, it's a rare skill actually looking at great leaders, unfortunately, in my view. Well, what you've just described there is being honest about what's going on behind the shell, isn't it?
And until you can be honest about what's going on behind the shell, you can't move forward. No, no, it's absolutely true. but it look different. But also the shell isn't just about you hiding stuff behind you. It also throws out complete misconceptions to those around you as well. And they're saying, no, look at that person, they look incredibly confident.
And also they don't give me any signal that they want any help or invite any questions or they know it all, don't go near them, which doubles down on the problem. Yeah, yeah. Well, what an amazing thing to have a conversation with you, David Roach, the coach. So your book's called Becoming a Successful First Time CEO and it's available on all main bookstores or as a gift if you're an aspiring CEO and you go and work with David. How do contact you?
The best way is to go to my website which is www.greyareacoaching.co.uk And for anyone in America or doing America's Bell, it's great as G-R-E-Y, not A-Y. And you can get me up, David, at greyareocoaching.com. No, don't, code it UK, sorry. Brilliant. Well, thank you, David, for coming to The Coaching Inn. Do watch out for that book, because it's a great read. And it's a readable read, which makes that even better.
And if you want to get future episodes of The Coaching Inn, don't forget to subscribe or follow. Thank you, David, for coming. Thank you. It's nice to be in a pub at this time of the my birthday. Happy birthday. Thank you. Congratulations. Thank you for coming. Bye bye. Thank you so much. and all major podcast channels. We look forward to welcoming you next time. You've been listening to The Coaching In, 3D Coaching's virtual hub. For more information, check out 3dcoaching.com.