Coach Highlight - Meet Daniel Welling
And away we grow! We have had several additional coaches recently join our team at ConnectStrat and each week we plan on introducing you to one of them. This week, we would like to welcome Daniel Welling, representing our group in the UK. Daniel brings a lot of energy to our team across the pond and here is our recent interview with him: Tell me a little bit about your personal life. Where did you grow up? School? Family?
My claim to fame is being born in Windsor, although that is where my royal connection ends! I grew up in the south of England and live with my wife in Marlow, a lovely town, full of pubs on the river Thames, with a rich rowing heritage.
How about your early business life? Where did you get started?
My parents had their own business, a small chain of bed shops, so entrepreneurship was in the family, and my first business whilst still at school was gardening. Before I could drive I could be seen pushing a mower along the pavements to my next garden.
Going door to door to find gardening work led me to sales, when I realized I preferred being indoors during the winters, and after the typical ‘first roles’ I discovered the IT industry, initially selling PCs.
My second role in IT sales introduced me to solution selling, and really gave me the grounding for what we know as an MSP today.
After 5-years with a Compaq-VAR and no further progression possible from the role of Sales Manager, I knew business ownership was the next step and co-founded my first ‘proper’ business in 2002, which I exited 12-years later.
How did your passion for coaching, teaching, and facilitating start?
It really started back in the late 90s, with the responsibility of training and developing the sales people in my team, further refined as I built the commercial team in my own MSP business.
I enjoyed the education of customers and my team, as I understood myself the emerging technical trends, challenges and opportunities, and how to apply that understanding to reducing client risk and driving my own profitability.
Every day remains a ‘school day’!
Tell me more about your experience in that regard. Where have you focused your work since you began coaching?
The MSP market is full of technically-founded leaders, with plenty of misunderstanding around the professionalism of ‘sales’ and how to truly help customers, success in which then leads to building teams to scale and the challenges and opportunities of managing a larger entity, all the time getting further away from ‘the tools’ day to day.
By design or accident, my mentoring clients have tended to be on that journey and where I feel I have the most to offer, really from 0-50 person MSP businesses.
Finally, bringing it back to the personal side, what do are you passionate about outside of work? What do you do to balance?
Motorsport is a key interest for me, and as yet an unrealized ambition to be commercially driving the sport (not being mechanically-minded or sufficiently brave and talented enough for the driving). Having been involved in sponsorship acquisition and management in British motorsport I now have my eyes set on working within the F1 ecosystem, and helping my SME network experience the business benefits of partnership. In motorsport, business and life, ‘balance’ is key to success!