4and20million - Agency Showcase

4and20million is a professional training and coaching agency that specialise in helping businesses get the best out of their people. Launched in 2018, they have gone from strength to strength with an impressive list of clients including KPMG, Sky Media and Wavemaker, all with the same goal - to maximise the potential of their workforce. We recently caught up with one of the founders, Josie Saville, to find out all the agency's recent developments and hear their exciting plans for the future. 

What is your main job role and responsibility within the business?
4and20million is small but perfectly formed! There are just three of us; myself, Alex Heywood and Dan McNicholas. We worked together at Wavemaker for 13 years before taking the leap to co-found our own business together 18 months ago. It’s been an amazing experience. We’ve pushed ourselves into new territories and have learnt more about ourselves and each other over this short time than we probably did in the whole previous 13 years. There’s no place to hide when it’s just three of you - and your salary is totally dependent on the three of you alone!

With regard to responsibilities, we simply get stuck in with whatever task needs to be done! However, we do make sure that we are all spending the majority of our time playing to our individual strengths. I spend more time thinking about our product content, making sure everything we do is highly engaging, relevant and inspiring. Dan is the strongest of us at executing ideas, turning our priorities into reality and ensuring all of our work has a positive impact. Alex drives us forward, spending more of his time out in the world, building client relationships and opening new opportunities for 4and20million. As I said, we are small but perfectly formed to create, execute and sell.

Please explain what you guys do?
We help businesses achieve extraordinary. We do this through maximising the most important asset of any business - their people.

We have a range of training products that are all focused on helping people to unlock their full capabilities. We basically supercharge people - either as individuals or as teams. Everything we do is about helping businesses to thrive….by helping the humans at the heart of the business thrive.

The three of us have all attended a wide range of training over our careers. From the good, to the bad, to the ugly! We have gold standard expectations of ourselves and strive to create compelling, energy-boosting, impactful training experiences. We understand that everyone walks into a training session with a head full of other work demands, deadlines, expectations, frustrations, hopes and preconceptions.  A group of unique individuals doesn’t need a one-size-fits-all theory lesson. Our sessions are engaging, interactive and practical. They provide a fresh perspective and applicable skills and they continue to have a positive impact long into the future.

What project/account are you most proud of or excited about?
The project I am most proud of is our ‘Better, Faster, Smarter’ training. I feel real pride in this course as it’s been described many times as “life changing.” The incredible thing about this course is that the impact it has is a double-whammy: business growth as well as people growth. We teach people how to be more productive but not through working themselves into the ground.

This training excites me because of all the skills we train, this skill is the one few people would highlight as something they need, and yet it’s actually the most vital skill of the 21st century. The outcome of this training is the ability to maintain concentration amidst a noisy, distracting, fast-moving world. This might not feel like a ‘vital skill’ but once you take a moment to consider how the pace of the working world has increased exponentially and we’ve all accepted a daily working pattern of endless interruptions, you see just how critical it is that we all bring more focus into our work. Our current way of working leads to the average office worker being productive for less than 3 hours a day (despite us working longer hours than ever before.) This training teaches and inspires people to create the space and time to tackle the work challenges that require real intelligence, application and deep thought.  It teaches people to thrive in the whirlwind of modern work.

Real productivity is not about being the first person to respond to an email. It’s about getting the big things done; choosing to give your attention fully to the tasks in which you personally can make a big difference to your business. I absolutely love delivering this training as it enables people to deliver higher quality work in a shorter space of time whilst decreasing stress and increasing job fulfilment. Everyone wins!

What have been the challenges of starting your agency and are there any learnings you can share?
I find it fascinating that many business leaders understand that they need their people to deliver more in order to drive the business forward, but they believe this can happen without investing in upskilling their teams. There is a very simple correlation between increased investment into your people and increased business success. A business is nothing without its workforce and yet training can often slip down the priority list. 

I truly believe that investing in your people is more important than ever before. The modern world of work is fast paced, ever-changing and rarely a smooth ride. In order to thrive, a business no longer just needs its workforce to show up and put in a decent shift, it now needs them to build relationships, to bring new ideas, to be resilient to change, to lead and inspire others, to be committed and energised. These are not skills that just appear. These are skills that need to be learned and developed. Every company develops the technical skills of their employees over time. The businesses who also develop the human skills needed to thrive in the modern workplace are the businesses that will achieve extraordinary.

What is next for you guys?
Right now, we are simply focused on making a positive impact on more people through our training. We created 4and20million with the ambition of helping as many people as we can to reach their full potential. This is still what makes us tick.

One of our core beliefs is simply to aspire to be a bit better every day.  Whatever your job, circumstances or experience, we can all improve all the time, and the joy of doing so is more than worth the effort. The three of us are excited to continue to push the boundaries, to create inspiring training and to have a positive impact on the people we work with.

Thanks Josie and we hope it all continues to go really well at 4and20Million. 

If you would like more info on this great agency, check out their website here. 

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