Your Pillar For Growth
so my name is ron williams investor and
entrepreneur what i’m going to try to do
today is give you a flavor for how i
operate in business how i grow business
businesses how i develop people
i’m going to talk about two things
really first of all i’m going to give a
quick piece on leadership and what i
think is important in terms of being a
leader
and second of all the kind of core
values that i utilize to give people
purpose both myself and other people and
businesses i invest and get involved in
at the tropical age of 46 i’m at that
stage where i realize what i’m good at
and probably what i’m not too good at
and one is management i’m really pretty
terrible sometimes at managing people
not good at giving lists of to-do lists
and things like that what i do think i’m
reasonably good at is leadership and
giving people that sense of purpose as
i’ve mentioned
and the core values that come with this
built around my pillar model i’ll talk
about in a moment or two
but first of all in terms of leadership
what i’d like you to do in your head is
just close your eyes and create a
virtual sheet of paper in your mind
and i want you to think about um all the
great leaders that you work for right
across your career that you’ve met in
life or even people from history so if
it’s the churchill type figures or
whatever it might be and on the
left-hand side of that piece of virtual
paper in your mind i want you to write
down everything you thought that made
them a great leader so maybe it was they
were charismatic maybe they were strong
maybe they were passionate things like
that so in your mind just think about
that later and write down everything you
loved about them
and then take the other side of that
piece of virtual paper in your mind and
then think about all the behaviors that
you maybe didn’t like very much they
were a little bit arrogant maybe they
were selfish um maybe they were rude
sometimes and write your list on that
side as well
now what i want you to do is take that
virtual piece of paper turn it right
down the middle and just keep the piece
on the left and do that
okay that’s my the best advice i can
give you in terms of leadership
being a good leader involves many things
but i always think you need a set of
core values that determines who you work
with who you invest in and who you
develop and grow and for me it’s very
much based around my pillar principles
so what does pillar stand for
p is for passion
i is for innovation
l is for likability second l is for
loyalty a is for amplification and r is
for relentless and i’m going to take you
through each of those now individually
p is for passion
if you can’t get passionate about your
business idea or the people that you
work with you’re always beaten i feel
before you actually start and being
passionate about what you do and who you
are and where you’re from is critically
important
the passion for me is really interesting
because i spent 25 30 years in what many
would call pretty steel industries and
facilities management in recruitment
into home car and things like that
what i found in terms of becoming more
passionate about those is a very simple
way of helping to do that
all three of those industries were
entries that ran aground on a ship
just off the edge of an island 25 30
years ago and what you find when you
enter those particular type of
industries is people might move the deck
chairs around a little bit but they
don’t realize that the whole ship is
just rusting rusting into the sea
what i like to do is get off that ship
get into my little rowing boat go over
to the island and start from scratch and
by building from the ground up and
developing your solution in that
particular space from the ground up
that’s where you can get truly
passionate about where you’re going who
you are and what you got to do
is for innovation my innovation for me
means many different things but i’ve
always found in the businesses that
we’ve grown over the last number of
years it’s really based on what i call
the three-legged mugging stool and
innovation has to focus on three things
the three t’s training talent and
technology now each of those things in
themselves if you don’t give enough time
enough focus on that like the
three-legged stool it will fall over
first of all you’ve got to find the very
brightest and best people to build
around your team and that brings a piece
of innovation with it if you like
second training so training is really
important if you don’t have the skills
in your organization you’ve either got
to go out and find them or you’ve got to
build them within your own teams and
i’ve always been much more successful in
building the skills and confidence and
confidence of the people around me than
bringing in new talent so you’ve got to
get that training piece right you’ve got
to innovate in that particular area
and then finally technology itself and
it doesn’t have to be the the cutting
edge technology of the moment it can be
something that’s tried and tested it can
be around logistics there’s loads of
different types of technology in that
particular space and it doesn’t always
need to be stuff that you innovate
around yourself as well
in our healthcare businesses we’ve lots
of different really interesting and
challenging projects on there around
incontinence management around
medication management but often what i
feel in terms of innovation is if we can
do one thing better than we did the day
before well then we’ve innovated and if
you can build that into the dna of an
organization and into your workforce
whether it be a carer or a cleaner or
whether it be a rocket scientist if you
can do one thing every single day better
you will ultimately succeed
first deal is also for likability
likability is a really strange thing for
me so you can never be likable to
everyone but you should try to be
likable to as many people as possible
and that’s not to be psychopathic it’s
really just to be nicer about how you go
about your daily life
the number of people i’ve met in
business and elsewhere that are just not
likable is sometimes truly exhausting
but if you’re going to build people into
your team to grow your business to grow
your your workplace workplace or
whatever it might be what you’ve got to
do is have that likable aspect of who
you are
i think shows like the dragon’s den and
the wolf of wall street and those sorts
of films and series and things like that
often give the wrong feel for what
business is like and this idea of this
antagonistic type of environment where
people have to answer really difficult
questions that doesn’t necessarily help
to grow anything it’s not a positive
ecology but if you put likability at the
center of that it changes the dynamic
second l is for loyalty so loyalty to me
is critically important
i think throughout your life throughout
your career you’re really really lucky
to find five to ten people who are
absolutely loyal now there’s a distinct
difference between blind loyalty and
healthy loyalty but if you can get that
group that little tribe around you you
can do some great things
if i look at within our healthcare
businesses that we’re involved in
my business partner there is from a
completely different background to
doogie and what we’ve done in healthcare
is grow a business employing just 50
people uh four or five years ago to a
business now employing over a thousand
in a four to five year period
that kind of growth comes about for a
whole range of things but at the center
of that is this notion of loyalty and
trusting each other’s abilities and what
you bring to the team so doing an
established entrepreneur from west
belfast has built numerous businesses
from dentists to pubs to everything else
and me from pretty much an academic
background so very proud to say i’m a
field lawyer
on a and i think that academic
background mixed with entrepreneurial
zeal and who we are as people allows you
to deliver that kind of performance so
loyalty is important when you find it
hang on to it and keep those people
around you if you’ve worked with them 20
years ago you should be working with
them today
a is for amplification by amplification
in a number of ways
first of all try and get involved in
things that actually can grow
exponentially and the businesses that
i’ve that i’ve invested in and mentored
and things like that who’ve got big
ideas and who don’t want to stop are the
ones that amplify in the right way
the other thing about amplification is
you’ve got to celebrate your wins and
being from the from the north of ireland
here what we don’t often do is celebrate
our successes because we’re a humble
bunch we’re humble people so dairy
londonderry is a humble city and we
don’t sing our positive stories half as
much as we should do and that’s why we
develop things like lab and your dairy
to try and celebrate that positivity
here in the city because it does exist
the other things i say about
amplification is you can’t just wait for
the white horse to arrive to save you
you have to develop your own uh stable
of white horses and go out into the
world and do some great things that’s
what amplification is and that’s what it
means
the final part of pillar is relentless
on how you be relentless uh i’ve never
been the best or the brightest in many
respects but one thing i can’t do is
stop
and most of the wins and most of the
things that we’ve achieved over the last
number of years in terms of relentless
is just staying for one minute longer
just doing one page more and things like
that so just going one step beyond every
single time
and that for us comes from a our family
so danny mcguire was a woman in
leicester ski back in the uh throughout
the last century and nanny maguire for
me died at the at the brilliant age of
94 sadly she raised eight kids husband
died of cancer when he was 40. she left
eight kids in a two up two down and
listened to this ski a beautiful part of
county format and in terms of danny
mcguire and what she was like from that
silent generation where every night she
went to work in the local factory came
home put the kids out to school in the
morning knitted uniforms and things like
that to generate some income to sustain
the family and did that for 15 20 30
years
she was so strong whenever she got into
she was still washing her feet in the
sink when she was 70 which i always find
quite amazing at 46 i couldn’t do that
now but she was still doing that but
when she was in her middle 80s her knees
had gone okay so her knees were in bad
shape and she got a chairlift put into
the put into the house much to her
disappointment and discussed and
everything else
and what she did was a couple about 18
months later she got two brand new niece
right so she went to the hospital got
two new knees and within six months she
phoned the nhs i believe the first woman
in the history of the nhs and then at
least to phone them to say can you
please come and take this chairlift back
out because my knees are fine now and i
can walk up the stairs yeah
that relentlessness to dignity and
things like that and the relentless in
terms of being an independent human
being was handed down to us
one of the things that i hear about um
the world today is this idea of the
snowflake generation because it doesn’t
exist and with the right role models
this idea of this relentless approach to
who we are and where we’re going and how
we grow businesses on ourselves is
critically important
so my son’s now 13 at the age of 11 he
was in the final of the north of the
cross-country championships
and a yard off the lang he got spiked
and lost one of the spikes himself
foot all bleeding and everything else
and he ran the next three mile of that
race in one spike i’m bleeding and he
finished third
not the fastest runner in the world not
the most talented but the most
relentless and this idea that we can
have the next generation who are equally
as relentless even with all the all the
bombardment of social media and things
like that we really can’t get there with
the right world models
so that’s pillar that’s how it works for
me and what i would challenge you to do
is build a pillar for yourself keep it
strong
build the foundations in the right way
build it for your family and most
importantly be a pillar for your
community thank you