DriveSpeed Group provide tailored vehicle solutions to clients across a range of industries from a base in North Yorkshire. The business has grown significantly since its incorporation in 2011, and has doubled in size in the last three years, with over 20 staff at their office on Fishergate in York.
In 2020 the dental industry was shut down for a couple of months, but Swallow Dental Supplies adapted its PPE product range and are now growing rapidly through their sales of bone regeneration material and other surgical dental supplies.
What a programme! I was pushed out of my comfort zone so many times. I was challenged, I was asked a lot of questions and made to look at myself. You would have thought this would be a total nightmare, however, this has to be one of the best courses I have ever been on as I have learnt so much without being in a classroom. Going through this journey has allowed me to improve my confidence and self-belief. I didn’t know this would be possible but taking part in all the challenging activities along with the fantastic coaching sessions has allowed me to achieve. A big thank you to the team!
Michelle and her team at Pro-Development have worked with myself and my development team at Howdens Supply Division on a number of development interventions and projects. This has included personal development coaching for high potential employees, team building and team performance development and the creation of Development Centres for talent assessment. Michelle is extremely creative in her design approach, ensuring it is completely aligned to business culture, values and model which enables greater impact and validity for the individual, team and business overall. Michelle is extremely personable and uses a range of experiential learning techniques and reflection that enable true learning experiences to occur. I would highly recommend her for any bespoke personal, team, management and leadership development interventions.
A fun filled, challenging programme, bringing management skills to life. Valuable learning to bring to the workplace. An excellent company to work with and I exceeded my own expectations in learning.
A challenging, amazing and fulfilling programme which has helped me regain my confidence, self-belief and shown me my true potential. Onwards and upwards from here!
Thank you Pro-Development for your time (and patience!) with me. I have really enjoyed our coaching and it has really helped me to understand myself and my relationships and value in improving them. As a reflector, I left each session with areas to consider and actions to take and felt I was supported in a way that suited me and my style which was appreciated.
Pro-development assisted our firm with putting together our first ever employee engagement survey. Although I had been involved with employee engagement surveys previously these were normally done by big global companies for the large companies I was working for. I was apprehensive initially about doing the survey and collating all the information I didn’t know where to start and could only think it was going to be an awful lot of work, and then I met Pro-development! They took care of the whole process guiding me and helping me to prepare I could do as much or as little of the prep work and feedback work as I wished or was able. The advantage of using Pro-development instead of the bigger providers was that I was able to adjust the questions to everyday language that we use as a firm. When using other providers previously I had found myself explaining the questions to all employees prior to the roll out of the survey which took a huge amount of time. Pro-Development provided me with a project proposal with suggested dates and timelines, it was visual to enable me to keep on track. Best of all they were on the other end of the phone to answer my many questions and came in to help when needed. All in all a great service and a great survey thank you Pro-development.
“I was struggling to know what steps I could take to improve my business when Pro-Development was recommended to me. Having first met Pro-Development over coffee, I felt they soon appreciated our problems and had a quick feel for the business therefore we were tackling issues head on quite quickly. They have been a complete revelation, increasing my awareness of my staff and customer’s requirements with a friendly and informal approach. My staff and I are learning what true teamwork is and our customers are really beginning to see the difference. I have enjoyed working with Pro-Development and learning so much about myself and my business, it has sometimes been an uncomfortable experience but always handled well and I have truly felt coached along the way. Pro-Development always arrive cheerful when some of the staff have viewed the process with trepidation and helped me to get their buy in to what we are trying to do ie make Dennis a better business both in terms of output and job satisfaction. I like the relaxed approach and friendly style, not being too ‘businessy’ with the staff and keeping things fairly informal. The employee engagement project was invaluable although it turned up some uncomfortable information at times. I felt I was helped to be ‘big enough’ to cope with it and to realise that change was necessary. The staff have benefited from it, some more than others, but it also made me aware of those that are willing to adapt and those that need more work. It has given a voice to some who felt marginalised and allowed me to understand the inner machinations of the business.
The Pro-Development team epitomise the winning combination of being professional, knowledgeable, passionate, and huge fun to work with. As a participant on their recent Leadership Development Programme, I learned so much about myself which was immediately applicable to the workplace (and at home!), which meant the return on money and time invested was a no-brainer. The course cleverly combined experiential outdoor learning in groups (with very different and stretching activities to anything I’d experienced before) with one-to-coaching sessions in between, and it’s this combination which is really powerful. If you’re serious about your own development as a leader, I couldn’t recommend them more highly.
With help from the lovely people at Pro-Development, our team building day at Harmony House Cookery School helped us to improve communication, feedback and delegation skills along with becoming dab hands at pastry! Throughout the day, Pro-Development ran a variety of sessions on how to communicate successfully, with focus on delegation, honest conversations and feedback, which were then combined with cooking challenges which provided an opportunity for the learning to come to life. It was a hugely valuable day that really showed us how to bring out the best in each other by sharing and understanding each other’s strengths and values. It brought us together even more as a team and demonstrated to us that you really can have your cake and eat it!
I have just completed the Pro-Development Management Development Programme and after a lifetime of training in various guises I have to say that nothing has or I think will ever come close to this course. The learning methods employed ensured continuous light bulb moments as we spent 7 months exploring different elements of leadership and working in teams. It was a privilege to be selected onto the directors cohort because Pro Development only run a couple of courses per year. There were 6 of us on the program which meant that we got very personal feedback and support. Each month we took part in different activities, in teams in a kind of ‘Apprentice’ style environment, which exposed all of our strengths and opportunities to learn. The feedback from my program colleagues and from Pro-Development has provided me with huge learnings about my own management skills and opportunities to focus on. I cannot thank you enough for selecting me for the course, you even ensured it was 50% funded through LEP. I would highly recommend this style of training to any business owner or manager of a team, it is great fun and most importantly you cannot fail to learn and develop as a leader as a result. Thank you!!
