Your people are your most important resource. Unfortunately, whilst agreeing with this statement in theory, many SMEs spend little or no time putting the theory into practice. Getting the most from staff is the responsibility of a company's managers - do you invest in yours?

Well trained managers can have an incredible impact on the success of a company, whatever its size:

• staff communicate effectively so that misunderstandings and/or wastage is minimised
• staff are more motivated, so achieve more for themselves and each other
• staff develop new skills which improve the efficiency of the company
• sales staff exceed targets
• customers experience higher levels of customer service, and so come back again and again
• Most importantly, profitability is improved

When businesses start trading with a handful of staff, communication between team members is generally strong, and customer service skills seem to develop naturally, because each member of the team has an obvious stake in the success of the business. Large organisations with hundreds or thousands of employees usually have established management training programmes to achieve this.

At ELK, we can provide a solution to companies who fall between these two extremes. We focus our management training on five key areas: Communication skills, leadership skills, team building skills, marketing skills and coaching skills.