Leadership

Whether leading an activity session or running a business, I pride myself on being able to communicate with others and motivate them to get their best prossible perfomance. This has often been with a, "lead from the front" aproach, where I never feel comfortable asking others to do somehting I haven't done myself.

I've always acted with a leadership role where it's needed, while working in Spain as a Mountain Bike instructor, there were over 20 bikes that needed regular maintenance and an entire forest with multiple trails but no regular session plans. I took it apon myself to maintain the bike fleet and run regular trail side maintenence courses so all the staff would be confident to fix any trail side issues. I also took other instructors out for regular reccies to plan routes and session plans with the idea to have several routes for all levels of skill in the groups we ran.

After starting at Saddles and Paddles in 2015 I quickly realised the staff were excellent at customer service, but not too confident at the technical side of the business. Again, using my experience and knowledge of bikes and watersports, I starting running staff training sessions in kayaking, canoeing and paddle boarding, with the result being the staff are better equipped to talk to customers if they have a basic understading of the sport. Using my experience in other hire centres, I also started carrying out regular maintenance checks and designed a system to track what member of staff had carried out what work on both the hire bikes and hire boats. With over 80 bikes on our hire fleet, the full time mechanics had their hands full with managing customer bikes as well, so my system was desinged to track any issues found and raise them if warrented.

I'm confident to say that my management role at Saddles and Paddles created a confortable yet efficient workforce, the summer months can get incredibly busy and stressfull and myself and the owner of the company, pride ourselves on how friendly, polite and helpful our staff are. The role I set out for staff to follow is one of calming inclusion of all situations, while also the abiltiy to get stuff done when it's crunch time.