Before I started working with Brighter Uplift Co., I was doing everything myself: quoting jobs, chasing invoices, managing the warehouse. Within three months, my coach helped me hire an operations manager, set up a weekly reporting rhythm, and I finally took a holiday without my phone ringing every hour. Revenue went up 18% that quarter because I could actually focus on winning new contracts instead of packing boxes.
Helen Graves, owner of Graves Interiors, Nottingham
I was sceptical. I had been to a few seminars and they all felt like motivational fluff. This was different. My coach asked to see my P&L, my customer churn data, and my staff rota on day one. We found that I was losing about £4,000 a month on a service line I thought was profitable. Cutting it freed up time and cash to grow the parts of the business that actually made money.
Darren Osei, director at Osei Technical Services, Leeds
My biggest takeaway was learning how to have honest conversations with my team. I had two underperforming employees and I kept avoiding the issue. My coach role-played the conversations with me, gave me a framework, and I had both meetings within a fortnight. One person improved dramatically; the other left, which was the right outcome. The team morale shifted almost overnight.
Fiona Trask, managing director, Clearpath Recruitment, Birmingham
We brought Brighter Uplift in to help with succession planning. I wanted to step back from the day-to-day within two years. They helped me identify which of my senior staff could take on the managing director role, built a development plan for her, and restructured the board. I am now working three days a week and the company is running better than when I was there five.
Malcolm Priestley, founder, Priestley Engineering Group, Sheffield
I run a chain of three cafés. Margins are thin in hospitality, and I thought coaching was a luxury I could not afford. Turns out it paid for itself in the first month. My coach spotted that my food-cost percentage was running at 38% when it should have been closer to 30%. We renegotiated two supplier contracts and redesigned the menu. That single change added roughly £2,200 per month to my bottom line across all three sites.
Anisha Kaur, owner of Kaur Kitchen, Manchester
Numbers tell the story better than adjectives. Here are two engagements where we tracked results from start to finish.
Helen was spending 25 hours a week on operational tasks that did not need the owner's attention. We mapped every recurring task, identified which ones required her specific knowledge (almost none), and hired an operations manager to take over. The freed-up time went straight into business development. Helen closed four new commercial contracts in the first quarter, something she had not managed in the previous eighteen months combined.
The coaching programme lasted six months. Helen renewed for a second year to focus on pricing strategy and expanding into a second warehouse location.
Darren assumed all five of his service lines were profitable because total revenue was healthy. When we broke down costs by service line, including allocated labour and vehicle expenses, one line was losing roughly £4,000 per month. It had been doing so for at least a year.
We helped Darren sunset that service over eight weeks, reassign the two technicians to higher-margin work, and communicate the change to affected customers. Three of those customers moved to a different, profitable service line. The rest were referred to a competitor, which actually improved Darren's relationship with that competitor and led to reciprocal referrals later.
We track outcomes for every engagement. These figures are aggregated across the 180+ businesses we have coached since 2016.