Featured Member Interview- April 2009

ROD HATTCH

Managing director,  wisdom learning

1. Your company Wisdom seems to have come a long way quickly- how did it start?
I started in 1996, just working on my own, as a sole trader and providing similar sort of services, training, consulting and facilitation. Over the last 13 odd years I’ve built the business up to where we are now with twelve staff, and we are a registered training organisation. In this journey we moved from working out of my basement to what we have now, which is a fantastic Learning Centre and lots of great people in our team and lots of great clients.

2. What gets you up in the morning?
What gets me excited is working with our clients and creating results for them. It’s always about the client, and, when we can get the client’s desired outcome, that’s what drives me. Being the business owner I also get excited by the opportunities that we can create for our team, for them to learn and grow, but primarily it’s about achieving results for our clients.

3. You’ve recently won several awards beating companies from around Australia- is there something about being based in Canberra that gives you an edge?
I don’t know whether it’s about being based in Canberra, but Canberra is a great place to do business, and so we have a diverse client base across both the private and the public sector and just the scale in terms of the size of the market is strong, but we do work right around Australia, but I think Canberra, in terms of its infrastructure, the client base, the talented people we have in the city really helps us with our success.

4. Tell us a little about your team and the values in your company.
We’re a values based company, which means that we make all of our decisions around a base of core values. Our values are innovation, respect, humility, professionalism and honesty. This means that the values are interwoven throughout the company; we recruit based on our values. So people who are invited to join WISDOM really need to share those values before they come on board, which stands us in good stead to operate as a team and really focus on our clients.

5. Is there something about providing first class training and professional development that makes it different from other forms of business?
We’re in the service industry. All of us in business need to focus on achieving results for our clients. Our product is training, facilitation and consulting services, which gives us an opportunity to do some different things; to train differently, to educate people and develop skills for people to help them achieve. So you end up with this exponential result; if we can develop new skills for people it can really help them learn and grow in their current role, help them get a new job, help them get a pay increase, really help them achieve what they want to achieve. So if we can do that a little bit for 15 or 20 people in a group the flow-on effects are then fantastic.

6. Is there one thing that makes for success in business?
I don’t think there’s one thing, I think there’s lots of little things. That’s the secret for us; it’s about doing the little things really well and doing them consistently. It’s about having a good strategy but being able to execute it; it’s about never losing the sight of why you’re actually in business, and for us that’s about achieving results for our clients. People can sometimes get a bit carried away with their own success, it’s nice to have all the awards that we’ve won but if we keep our focus on each client and it reminds us about why we’re in business, then we can continue to grow and offer a quality product. We have the philosophy that you’re only as good as your last project.

7. This year, Wisdom has teamed up with Schmooze as its learning and development partner- what was your thinking behind forming that partnership?
Schmooze is a very professional organisation with a lot of clients in their network. We have something to offer them, our best form of marketing is when we can get in front of people and talk to people, for prospective clients to get to know us and for us to get to know them. Through Schmooze that offers us an opportunity to meet new clients and for them to get to know us, and hopefully they like us and will want to do some business with us.

8. What does the future hold for Wisdom?
Hopefully more of the same, we want to keep achieving the best possible results for our clients. We’re still experiencing growth in our business, it’s organic, well-managed growth but it’s still growth. In the current economic time, a lot of organisations are talking about cutting back, but WISDOM is talking about expanding. We’re currently recruiting and we’re interested in good people who want to be part of a good business.