Professional and bespoke Midlands-based training provider, Righttrack Consultancy is gearing up to celebrate its 30th anniversary with husband and wife co-founders attributing success to a healthy mix of marriage and business.
In the last three decades, this couple-run start-up has become one of the UK's most trusted training providers, creating bespoke, in-house learning solutions for a vast range of businesses across two continents.
Kasmin Cooney OBE, Managing Director of Righttrack Consultancy, and Mike Cooney, Director started the business together after identifying a gap in the market for customised professional training in companies. Kasmin said:
“In our previous roles at large, multi-national companies, both Mike and I used to discuss how difficult it was to train our employees and how great it would be to find a training company that would actually come and listen to what you wanted instead of offering generic off-the-shelf courses. In-house training was out there but not as common as it is now, and the benefits of training were definitely not as well known.”
With a strong work ethic and a passion for training, Kasmin and Mike started Righttrack from their home while juggling family life:
“It was difficult in those days; one of us ushering the children out of the garage-turned-office whilst the other took customer calls. But we've always been proud to have instilled a strong work-ethic into both children.”
Starting with just two employees, thirty years on, Righttrack has grown to be one of the UK’s top 'boutique' training companies with almost 30 learning and development specialists, a support team of eight, and an impressive track-record of thousands of successful people development projects.
Over the last thirty years, while training topics have come in and out of trend:
“...a bit like shoes in that respect,” says Kasmin, Righttrack has survived three recessions: “They were challenging times. When you get a recession, training is often the first thing to get struck off the list. But we learned to restructure ourselves and our focus, which certainly helped us to survive the worst one following the banking crisis.”
Looking ahead, times have very much changed from training on telephone techniques and personal impact to modernising performance management, re-humanising customer service, and raising awareness of mindfulness and wellbeing in the workplace – all of which were unheard of thirty years ago.
“One of my bug bears is seeing the amount of stress in the workplace within managers and staff. There are higher levels of mental health issues than we’ve ever had across a lot of sectors so it’s great news that we’re seeing a focus on mindfulness and looking after people.” Kasmin continued.
Righttrack’s future looks bright and remains within the family as Claudia Cooney, Mike and Kasmin’s daughter, takes over as Lead Director. Joining Claudia on the Board is Vicci Whelan,
Customer Service Director, who was Righttrack's first employee joining the business as an apprentice in 1990.
Kasmin said:
“I'm very excited for the future. What customers love most about us is our ability to think creatively about people development and to align solutions with ambitious business objectives and organisational culture. Our job will always be to keep up with what’s going on and make sure we are developing solutions that enable our clients to enjoy their staff and their staff to enjoy their work.”