Meet Martin Gladdish - Business Development & Leadership Coach

In Sixty Seconds:

I have been a small business owner for twenty years – I know how that feels.

I’ve coached hundreds of other business owners and managers – I know what they need. I’ve written a dozen business books for business leaders – I know what they think. I’m sitting a 50-plus year study of human wants, motivations and what makes us tick – I’m still learning this one. And I have stumbled upon a set of decades in development, science-based, socially proven, personally tailored and delivered one-to-one programmes that actually work.

I know LMI will work for you for two reasons (1) After doing all of the above, it only took 3 months for the basic LMI ideas to change my productivity and leadership completely (2) I promise to hold your hand and work with you until these simple ideas make the powerful impact that will change the way you live and work forever.

The Longer Story

Early in 2024, I teamed up with the LMI UK team to start delivering their portfolio of life-changing personal development and leadership programmes (developed over 60 years in 90 countries and benefiting 2.5 million people). Starting with its core, Effective Personal Productivity programme, these courses take people on a development journey unlike any other, culminating in becoming the Total Leader.

My story started in retail management, then telesales and eventually, the rough, tough battlefields of London City frontline sales. I worked for Xerox, Robert Horne and Computer Cab, selling office supplies through to transport solutions, and my clients included Goldman Sachs, Commerzbank, Ernst & Young and Coutts Bank. It was a tough gig at times, but it toughened me up and set a foundation in place that I am grateful for today.

The truth is that I was rubbish at selling. I was far too gentle, dare I say 'nice' and afraid of people saying 'no'. But put a pen in my hand, and the sales ninja came bursting through... My colleagues loved my follow-up emails, sales letters, and persuasive written communication skills, and I opened doors and closed more deals that way than face-to-face.

To cut a long story short*, I left the city behind in 2005 to become a freelance copywriter. Eventually, I settled into a niche as a ghostwriter of business blogs and business books. Then, in 2017, I took on the persona of The Business Ghost (as a specialist in writing and planning other people's business books).

In addition to being the invisible pen behind over a dozen books for others, I am the author of The Lazy Optimist and Build Your Business in 90 Minutes a Day (with Nigel Botterill) in my own name.

(The Lazy Optimist contains the slightly longer version of the story I cut short earlier*. It tells the sad tale of a daydreaming, busy fool who finally got out of his own way, and happily managed to stop time long enough to allow the dream in his head to become a reality.)

As the result of another long story (not yet committed to a book), from 2021 to 2023, I took on what my wife calls ‘a proper job’. I worked (full-time PAYE) for The Entrepreneurs Circle as a Masterplan Business Coach, mentoring over 60 small business owners through the UK's most comprehensive, end-to-end, birth-to-exit, fix-to-scale-and-sale business growth programme. It was amazing, and I learned so much from seeing others apply the process and work towards their dreams that I just had to get out and do more of it myself.

But the two biggest lessons my only employed role in the last two decades taught me also were the reason I left. (1) After coaching other business owners on how to run their businesses properly, I realised I had never run mine properly for all those years. (2) I worked far harder for The EC than I’d ever worked for myself. In other words, I was the problem that needed fixing – so I had to put that right.

Working with LMI has changed everything for me and about me as a business owner, leader and coach (personally and in business). It has given me the opportunity to tick all my boxes: