Negar RiazatiChief Executive Officer (CEO) Australia & Asia Region at Performia Australia

Performia Australia Testimonial - Alistair Gillard

19 Aug 2010 · 4 min

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3:32

In this testimonial, Alistair Gillard, the financial controller of Corinna Sherlock Enterprises—a furniture import and distribution company serving retail stores across Australia—describes a period of prolonged business difficulty marked by significant staff turnover and declining performance. Determined not to abandon the business, he turned to Performia for executive training. Although the training did not introduce revolutionary concepts, it presented them in a clear, structured format that was easy to implement. Key actions taken included creating an organizational chart to define roles, assigning purpose and goals to each position, and establishing measurable performance criteria. These changes led to a dramatic boost in staff morale, increased sales, and a more engaged workforce. Two underperforming staff members left, which was later seen as beneficial, while remaining employees expressed enthusiasm for the new direction. Gillard concludes that Performia’s structures and principles are valuable not only for struggling businesses but also for already profitable ones seeking to enhance success.

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Hi, my name's Alistair Gillard. I'm the financial controller at Corinna Sherlock Enterprises. We're importers and distributors of furniture, soft furnishing, decorator accessories. We supply retail stores all over Australia. For the past probably 18 months, our business was struggling, and struggling for a variety of reasons. But we made a decision that, look, we didn't want to just walk away from the business. We felt it had a lot to offer and we needed to do something about it. And so we came to Performia to get some advice on how can we turn things around. And we knew they, they had a whole lot of training regimes for executives and senior executives. On offer, and we liked their approach. We'd had quite a significant staff turnover for the past 2 years, and that was a great cause of concern. We felt that contributed to the decline in the business. It's like night and day for us going to that very first day, that we weren't learning anything that was revolutionary new, but they put it into a structure and a form which made it incredibly simple and easy to put in place into the business. One of the most important things we learnt is that we had to learn about ourselves, and it's not just about managing staff, isn't about the staff, it's also about managing ourselves. The most important things that we implemented through the Performia training Of course, was setting up an organisational chart which helped us to clearly identify what each person in the organisation's role was. We were able to give them a purpose, we were able to give them a goal in terms of their valuable final product, and we were able to set up a criteria where They could measure themselves how well they're performing. Morale has gone through the roof. The sales are going up. But it's just the reaction of the staff has been truly amazing. We would have thought there would be a lot of aggravation and a lot of uncertainty, but using the techniques that we learnt through Performia, All the staff came on board and they were enthusiastic. There was 2 staff members that we had who resigned, but as it turned out in hindsight, we already knew that perhaps they weren't the right people. And after they resigned, the other staff members came up to us voluntarily and said they were so glad that Those people left because they had been holding them back. If you're running a profitable business, you could be making a lot more profit by introducing the structures and principles as explained by Performia. It's not just for businesses struggling, it's for businesses that are already successful, but it's to make that success even better.