How I use Delenta as a HR Consultant - Blyde Neser

How I use Delenta as a HR Consultant - Blyde Neser

We caught up with HR Consultant and Team Coach, Blyde Neser - a Delenta user who is based in Australia with clients across the world.

1. Can you start by telling us a little bit about what sort of coaching you do?

I mainly specialize in leadership and team coaching. The majority of my clients are based in Australia, South Africa and New Zealand. I work with all career levels - from new graduates to business start-ups and CEO’s.

My clients include leaders or aspiring leaders who are serious about helping their team become high achievers, keen to be high achievers themselves or looking for a breakthrough in their business. Some of them are accomplished professionals who just want to figure out how to get to the next step in their career, are feeling overwhelmed with something, or want to develop strategies to address an issue they are experiencing with their teams.

Something I really love doing is coaching fairly new teams, building the right foundations to build trust and accountability, and setting the team up for success from scratch. Together, we go through a systematic, structured process that enables the team to ultimately add value to their stakeholders.

Thanks to an extensive background in Human Resource Management, I am also able to help clients who are wasting valuable time and money juggling priorities and cumbersome HR processes streamline their business processes so they can start getting a return on investment, stop wasting their precious time and start focusing on doing the work they love.

Delenta enables me to manage all my different coaching types (teams, groups as well as individuals) with ease.

I use a separate platform for psychometric assessments and diagnostics, but the nice thing about Delenta is that I can link everything together so my clients can access their assessments, client notes, workbooks, coaching appointments and resources all from one place.

2. How long have you been a coach for?

I have been in senior Human Resource Management for more than 3 decades working with leaders in a Business Partner capacity, mentoring and coaching leaders and training groups. I left my full-time career in 2019 to follow my WHY - helping professionals break through barriers that are holding them back from achieving the success they truly deserve.

3. What was the main thing that made you start your coaching business?

I took a step back and realized that in the role I was in didn’t give me enough control to help create real outcomes for leaders and teams because I had to spend too much of my time on the other aspects of HR. I wanted to make a more meaningful impact in professional people’s lives.

When we coach individuals, it usually has a positive influence on the people they work with. When we coach a group of individuals, this effect is exponential and powerful - creating much higher impact and value to our clients. Working with corporate teams is one of my strengths, and an area where you can really get traction and start seeing immediate results.

I recently had a situation where a business owner approached me about an individual who was under performing. Through the team coaching process, we discovered that this individual was just different from everyone else and the communication strategies that were applied were just not suited. We made a few minor tweaks to how the team works together. It enabled the team to unblock obstacles that have been holding them back, and discover things they didn’t know about themselves and the rest of the team. The individual who was originally the “problem child” in the team is now the top-performing employee in the organization.

I truly believe that people aren’t deliberately incompetent - there is also something beneath the surface.

4. Was launching a business just before Covid hit difficult for you?

Because I work with corporate clients, the bottom dropped out suddenly as companies were dealing with a set of unprecedented challenges. Many of my workshops that I’d had scheduled in were postponed overnight. Whilst these were very challenging times, it was also the times during which my clients needed coaching more than ever.

5. Has the pandemic meant that you have ended up doing more sessions on Zoom than you imagined when you were thinking of starting your own coaching business?

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Yes and no. Even before the pandemic, many of my clients already had remote or hybrid teams. Having the functionality available to use video made a difference for the ones who weren’t remote. The other thing I’ve found is that being able to do coaching workshops online allows for flexibility when plans change suddenly. For example, I recently had some face-to-face workshops planned for a government department in Canberra. The borders were closed overnight so I couldn’t travel to the client, but we were able to communicate with everyone through Delenta to flip things around quickly and convert the workshop to online. Having Delenta really helped me pivot more seamlessly.

6. Where do you typically find clients?

‍I am extremely fortunate to say that most of my clients have come through word of mouth or people who attend a workshop and then approach me individually.

7. How did you find out about Delenta?

‍I was part of a coaching community and people were asking about systems that we could use to make our lives easier. Someone in the group commented that Delenta might be something worth exploring. I played around with a trial version and was delighted to discover that it offers pretty much everything I need, even to the point of recording CPD for professional requirements such as AHRI (Australian Human Resources Institute) and ICF (International Coaching Federation).

8. Did you look at any other systems when you were considering a solution like Delenta?

‍Yes, I looked at a couple of others. Delenta coaching platform offered the best solution for me because it was configurable and integrated with the right things. I could use my own brand colours, which is important to me.

The team at Delenta were also very responsive.

For me that’s an important consideration - if I hit a roadblock with a system I need to know that there is always someone who can help me.

9. So can you take us through how your business changed before and after using Delenta?

Before Delenta, I thought I was organised. I had client take-on forms, files and notes in Google Drive and resources that I shared via OneDrive. My contracts were signed via Adobe Sign and I had electronic invoicing set up. I had a CRM set up too, and each client had a Trello board, but nothing was integrated. Logging my hours and CPD was a very manual process. Communication with prospects and clients was sitting in my e-mail and difficult to follow up. My calendar bookings weren’t seamless, and my availability was difficult to reflect in the right spots. I consider myself pretty technical but even so, having different systems to manage different parts of your business quickly becomes chaotic as they don’t talk to each other.

Delenta enabled me to manage all of this from one single platform, saving me a lot of time and helping me get much more organised. It helps me manage the entire process end to end.

I hope more therapists, coaches, counsellors and other practitioners will discover Delenta – not only because it will make their lives easier but also to prevent risks with client paperwork. Having a system where everything is one place just means you don’t have to worry about the peripheral things and can concentrate on the coaching. It’s all about streamlining things.

10. Where do you see your business going in the next 12-24 months

I have started refining what I do a little bit, reviewing my packages on Delenta and reducing the scope of what I was offering previously. I also want to finalise my signature programme. I am planning to do that in Delenta using the Course Builder and then do a little bit of automation around that so that the standard steps that people take as part of my programme can happen automatically.

11. For new coaches, what would you say were the biggest challenges?

‍Many coaches aren’t specialists in marketing. Often, they have not run their own business before and have no idea where to start. They need something that makes it easy for prospects to find them and engage with them. They also need to know which components of their business they need to attend to and how to pull it all together.

It can be challenging because they need to get deep into their core marketing, such as working what their key message is, who are your ideal clients. When I have new clients who want to be coaches and I ask them that question, a lot of them don’t know. Most new coaches know that they need to keep notes from their sessions and have them in one place, but on a deeper level that they also need to know the basics of business. Legal requirements, business planning, marketing plans, compliance, insurances, contracts, privacy, logging your hours for formal accreditation and invoicing can be very challenging if you haven’t done it before. If you use a system like Delenta you can get the administrative burdens out of the way and focus on doing what you are there for in the first place: coaching, rather that wasting precious time flapping around trying to remember whether you’ve invoiced someone.

Thank you so much for sharing your experience with us.

Want to see what your coaching business could look like streamlined?

‍Try Delenta for free today and give yourself the freedom to focus on what you do best: coaching transformation.

Blyde Neser - Business Consultant | Accredited Coaching for Leaders, Teams and Professionals | Business Mentoring | HR Systems (delenta.com)

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