- Speaker #0
Hello, I'm Ruth Kearns-Wollmann and welcome to Milestone Moments, short extracts from my podcast interviews to inspire, encourage and equip you on your personal path to success. Back in 2019, I interviewed founder and managing director of Kinetic Consulting, Will Hogg. In this clip, you will hear two short extracts of the interview where Will shares two different milestone moments. Moments when tough experiences pushed him to take courageous action in the direction of his vision and his values.
- Speaker #1
P&G was a place where you were there for 10 years. You were already showing these strengths and engaging them and growing in them. What in the end caused you to leave and to found your own company?
- Speaker #2
Again, there's two parts to this. So it's a story of pull and a story of push. The pull is that... since I was a teenager, I've been really driven and I continue to be driven to provide opportunity for people born into less fortunate circumstances than I was. I think this was partially nurtured in that my mother, in whom I'm very proud, has spent significant parts of her life working with adolescent women in some very challenging situations and parts of the world. This example for me was then deepened by personal experiences. Firstly, I had a year in a youth club in inner city Liverpool. And then later I was training young soldiers from significantly tougher contexts than the one that I grew up in. And all of that added up to really instill this desire in me to ensure that I left, that I personally left the most positive footprint that I could on my part of the world. So that was really a pull that sometimes felt very challenging in what for me was sometimes the rarefied context of a blue chip corporate. A wonderful place to work, but sometimes for me, I had this pull between. between the privilege that I felt there and what I really wanted to do with my life. The push, which was, it was an unfortunate push. And in retrospect, every cloud has a silver lining, is that my father died suddenly. He was only 61 and it was just before Christmas, 2007. And obviously I was at his funeral and seeing so many people there who genuinely loved him. So many people was, was for me, both moving and really challenging. And it made me immediately reassess my own priorities in life and ask myself, imagine that I die age 61, what will I have wanted or needed to achieve if I die in 25 years time? So with that catalyst and given the dream above, the pull part, it's really only natural in retrospect that I then left P&G within a year. And whilst there have been many twists and turns since then, and I guess we're going to talk about them, the objective or my objective has remained very constant. since I resigned 11 years ago, which is to build a business that provides the resource to positively impact the lives of disadvantaged youth.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it, how the core desire is to have a greater impact, to do something more. And I see your values showing up there, values of, you know, really wanting to serve and help people who are more disadvantaged and to give back in a way. And I guess a lot of us have that. And many people I know, probably including myself, left P&G with big dreams. But not everybody who makes that shift, that leap, succeeds. In fact, many people dream of founding their own company, but there's a minority who make it past the first few years. What key strategies and actions enabled you to succeed and get over the challenge of the first few years?
- Speaker #2
Yeah, I'm probably going to misquote it, but there's some saying along the lines of, If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with others. And this is a very simple truth for me that I keep learning, sometimes by mistakes, sometimes by success, but I keep learning over and over again. And that's because what I find is that when I'm alone, often my strengths are overused and then they work against me. So my drive, that stubbornness that we talked about, in the context of a clear objective, can become a very naive belief that just pushing hard enough will always work out in the end. And when I meet obstacles, I can get very just focused on, well, if I just keep pushing, it will happen. And this clear misunderstanding, this clear error has caused me to make some major mistakes. I've made big mistakes in investments. I've made big mistakes in deals. I've made big mistakes in projects. I've made big mistakes in strategy choices, and I've made big mistakes in hiring. And at worst, on top of that... my natural optimism can cause me to keep reinforcing those errors when it's clear to other people around me that I should stop.
- Speaker #1
Right.
- Speaker #2
Conversely, you know, where we are today, where Kinetic is today, is because it's now driven by a team. And it's driven by a team of, again, I think we'll talk about it later, but values-based professionals who all have 20 to 25-year track records in leading organisations. That gives them the credibility and the right to talk with the client at eye level.
- Speaker #0
It was the death of Will's father that acted as a catalyst for him to leave his corporate career in 2008. and set out to found his own company in pursuit of what he wanted to achieve within his lifetime. But it would take a brush with his own mortality in 2017 to push him to take another courageous step towards fulfilling the true purpose he'd set out to achieve. Let's hear him describe the milestone in his own words.
- Speaker #1
What are you most proud of achieving and what have been some of the biggest disappointments or even failures?
- Speaker #2
Yeah. So there are certain elements that have been there from the early days in which we're all proud. If you were to walk around the office right now, I think what you would hear is that we have a fantastic client list that includes some of the most respected companies in the world in some very different industries. To mention a few, HSBC, ABB, Caterpillar, Shell. And on top, we have a 75% repeat rate. So, you know, this is a, this is an industry measure. And obviously I will joke, it's not for coming back to answer the same problem. But most recently, two years ago at a deeper level, I was sitting in hospital. I just had a large lump removed from inside my head and, and I took the opportunity, there wasn't much else to do. So I took the opportunity to reappraise how I was doing and how the business was doing against the objectives that I set myself after my father died. And really, as I look back, there was a lot that I was proud of, but equally, I identified two major issues that I determined to fix after I recovered. The first was my natural tendency to pace set as a leader, pace setting in the sense in terms of taking on too much myself, doing it myself, not allowing space for other people to contribute as they could. And I realized that this was seriously limiting the growth potential of Kinetic. And secondly, and partially as a consequence of the points I just made, I'd got nowhere close to where I needed to be in terms of leading towards the purpose of kinetic, the reason I set up in the first place. So, you know, looking back over the last 24 months, whilst we and I really have a long way to go in permanently closing those gaps, I sometimes wonder if we will ever permanently close those gaps. My greatest pride is in what we've been doing to get back on the right direction in these two areas. So on the first point, we're right now heading for our most successful ever year by quite a margin, driven by the broadest team contribution yet in the history of Kinetic. So we now have 50 people all working on clients this year.
- Speaker #0
It's impressive.
- Speaker #2
And that trend is just increasing, which is huge excitement and it creates a huge buzz for all of us. And second, and I have to acknowledge here a significant amount of voluntary effort and love from the Kinetic team members and indeed from some clients. We delivered our first youth development camp this year. That camp was based on mixing 16-year-olds from very different backgrounds. In fact, one of them was my daughter, from private to inner city schools, and enabling them to work together on our kinetic leadership tools, the same kinetic leadership tools that we use with senior management in some of the corporates I talked about. Wow. It was fantastic. It was a raging success. It was very positive for all of us who are there, very humbling, and gave all of us this deep... belief and conviction that this is just the start and there has to be a whole lot more to come. So there's some failures and hopefully something to be proud of as well.
- Speaker #0
And so what is your dream of the whole lot more to come there with the kids?
- Speaker #2
Yeah, it's a great question. I think there's broadly two things. One is as we do our leadership development activities, some of them, for example, are with some high net worth families. is is in mixing creating social mobility in those courses so creating opportunities for for peers from very different backgrounds which frankly i think benefits everybody in the mix right so that's if you like within the core business of kinetic continuing to grow that the second is is doing more of these youth development camps so creating more of these opportunities outside of kinetics core business where many of us volunteer to create more and more of these experiences and unleash the leadership potential people from all different contexts.
- Speaker #1
So it's like really giving back what you've managed to learn over your life and also the team that you managed to bring together to...
- Speaker #2
grow more leaders in the next generation. Absolutely. And that's why for me, as well as it's so emotional to see the Kinetic team giving their time and frankly, their love to these type of projects, and even more to then have clients come in on the journey. And my hope is to grow this into truly a virtuous cycle where everybody is giving back and benefiting at the same time.
- Speaker #0
Will took some challenging moments in his life. as an opportunity to reassess where he stood with respect to his purpose, his vision and his values, and to set himself back on track. But as Will himself said to me recently, we don't need to wait for a close brush with death to choose to readjust our trajectory or to take a bold step. What we do need is courage, courage to face reality and courage to step up for what really matters. So let me leave you. with a challenging and powerful question. What is it time for in your life? If you'd like to hear the whole of my interview with Will, please do hop over to episode eight, which was published in December 2020, and do subscribe to make sure you receive new content as soon as it comes out. If you'd like to find out more about my coaching and facilitation services, please do visit my website, yourpathsuccess.ch. Thank you for listening and I wish you much courage, compassion and curiosity as you navigate your own personal path to success.
