Hello everyone! It’s my pleasure to welcome you to another edition of Up Close & Personal for the Renegade Magazine. I actually love this part of the editor’s role as I get to go out to see some of our Master level members in their own environments, and for me today it’s a pretty special one. I’ve been waiting to do this interview since this guy bounded into my life some 9 months ago and I’m lucky enough to have his presence in my Oak Mastermind Group. And it’s fair to say that he’s an amazing and well-loved member. When I first met him, I thought “Whoa, hold on there princess”. He’s like a whirlwind of energy and a huge ball of fun to be around and his attitude to life in general is so infectious. I had to wait a long time to do this though because a recent spate of ill-health brought on by that huge amount of energy and that work ethic laid him a little bit low, very low for a few months in-fact. I know he’ll probably talk about that as we get into the interview at some stage, but for now I can’t wait to get started. So, let me introduce you to an amazing, fantastic, the person and legend that is, Rees Lightening as we like to call him. Ladies and gentlemen. . . Mr Paul Rees. How is it Paul, how are you?
Paul Rees: It’s great to be here and thank you for having me and taking the opportunity.
Steve Matthews: It’s lovely to be here mate. Well, it’s little bit of a change for us at the moment as we’ve got a little bit of a re-vamped Up Close & Personal interview and you’re unfortunately the guinea pig for it. We’ve got a list of common questions from now on that we’re going to ask every entrepreneur that we see. It’s just nice to know little bit more about you and some of the stuff that drives you as well. So, I’m going to go through these questions, some of them are really easy, some of them are a little bit harder. So, Paul Rees, tell us a little bit about what you do.
PR: My business is called Accolade Executive Business Coaching and I’m a peak performance expert. Basically, we help individuals and high functioning teams to take hold and sustain a peak performance business lifestyle within the business, so they don’t get those burn out stages. And what happens generally with high functioning teams or individuals, or someone just starting their business, we have these spurts of enthusiasm and sometimes within teams it’s spurts of being able to work together and then not work together. We all carry our mood swings and things, so what we do through the programmes we’ve designed over the last 13 years, called the EETA Programme, we’re able to instil into the business how to sustain a peak performance lifestyle. What is does then, it guarantees that business, the growth or the seat value that they are expecting from each employee. Because when you get your pay rise every year, do you actually do anymore for it? So, what we do as part of the Peak Performance Programme is, analyse and look at every aspect of that person, that team, how they’re working and how we can keep improving that team to compliment the annual salary increase of increase in cost and all these things that happen in business.
SM: Don’t tell any of my staff about that pay rise every year mind. . . So, tell us where you’re from.
PR: So, originally, I’m a valley boy from Maesteg. I was brought up in a place called Llangynwydd, on the edges of the valleys on a council site, which is very much a community place. You could walk into your next-door neighbours and borrow a cup of sugar and that was fine. It was a great upbringing, I enjoyed it. That was my roots and now I’m only 20 minutes from where my roots were, travelling by car, so I haven’t moved too far away. Although we are fortunate to travel with our work.
SM: I know the business takes you all over the place, Canada and the US, but tell us about your wife now Paul because I know she’s in the business as well.
PR: Yea, Deb is what we call a Life Performance Expert and when I say Life Performance, a lot of our work is in business and she’s my right arm, my left arm, my backbone and my soul. She’s my centre. Deb is my centre, without her, we’ve been working in business 13 years together. These offices you see are the first time we’ve actually worked separate in a room environment, we’ve always been together. Travel, plane, car, boat, plane, bus. . . Everything together. It’s been amazing for me.
SM: Fair play to you, that’s excellent. I was going to say actually, behind every successful man there a woman rolling her eyes normally.
PR: I have 2 daughters, Danielle who’s the oldest, going on to 19 and Ffion is 17. Two great daughters.
SM: So, you are officially the bank of mum & dad and the registered taxi driver.
PR: Yea, most of the time yea. Absolutely.
SM: I’ve got to ask you Paul, how old are you now?
PR: I’m 50, a very young 50. I was brought up where age was so unimportant, although we celebrated birthdays, it wasn’t considered an importance to think about. I couldn’t tell you how old my mother is. I have no idea how old my mother and father are, because it was just so unimportant. I think my eldest sister is in her 50’s somewhere. I’m not sure about my eldest brother and I have no idea how old my youngest sister is either.
SM: I think that might be a cultural thing actually, I only know my old man is 30 years older than me, so that’s pretty easy that is, and my mum is 21 all the time. . . How long have you been self-employed or run a business for Paul?
PR: We’re into our 14th year now, it’s certainly been a process and a journey. It is everything people say it is when you run a business.
SM: What inspired you to run your own business?
PR: I think it was a double-edged sword, the regular job I was in, I was made redundant. I had no qualifications leaving school so I didn’t really know what I was going to do and the job I was in was like a self-made position for me where I was kind of coaching and mentoring and so I just sort of thought ok, I’ll take that a step further and went out there. Coaching wasn’t something that there was a lot of in those days, 14 years ago, so yea it was certainly a dive in. Fake it til you make it with integrity.
SM: Am I right in saying that you had your first coaching gig in another company?
PR: Canada. Yea, absolutely. So, actually the first time around, and that’s when me and Deb met, we tried our own business together first, and that was like a Teaching Academy. We’d renovated this 3-storey building that could accommodate 30 students in one go with class rooms and everything and we just wrapped up about 90k in debt and went into bankruptcy. . . No idea how to run a business, no idea at all. We just assumed if we built it and put it there, people would come. And what happened was, we built it, and nobody came, because we didn’t know how to advertise. So that swooped us straight into bankruptcy the first time. And after that, I thought, right I’m done with the UK for a little while, so my father got me a laptop because I couldn’t get anything as everything was taken from the bankruptcy. He got me a laptop and a mobile phone account under his name. And with that laptop I just emailed any inbox I could find in the US and Canada offering emotional intelligence in the workplace because that’s all I knew at that point and I got picked up by a business promoter in Canada. .
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