When husband and wife team, David & Helen Williams founded 3W Growth in 2016, their mission was clear: They understand business, they understand people, so to use their coaching & mentoring skills to help grow both.
They each brought a tremendous amount of experience to the table.
As managing director, David had grown a family’s baked goods business from one employee to over one hundred supplying the UK’s top grocery conglomerates, and Helen had made a name for herself helping the UK’s largest financial institutions retain and develop their top talent.
But not everything was rosy.
For over 20 years, both Helen and David had worked long hours, and they were tired of not spending enough time with their family. Professionally, they longed to share everything they’d learned about business strategy, growth and people development with like-minded owner-operators, and most of all, they craved the freedom to combine their expertise and take their careers in a new and rewarding direction.
We teamed up with another business coach, Tim Sutton from Fresh Growth Solutions. We talked about all the things in leadership we wish we had known earlier, which could have helped develop us and our businesses so much more quickly. With that idea, we created our first two-day residential inspirational leadership retreat.David Williams, Founder 3W Growth
Before starting 3W Growth, Helen and David had each leveraged the power of Insights Discovery to transform teams.
Helen by working with executive teams in the corporate world, and David by developing leaders (including himself) to expand the baked goods business - a move that would triple the business in three years.
In fact, David had already begun working with other companies as a non-executive director; using Insights Discovery as a tool to help them identify and break down roadblocks to their own business growth.
So, when it came time to choose which products 3W Growth would share, there was one clear choice.
There’s a lot of systems out there, but the key reason we use Insights is that it’s sticky. People remember their colour and remember their colleagues’ colours quickly. With other systems, there’s more of a chance they might be put in a drawer and forgotten, but the Insights system is memorable and people use it more after the workshop. This is important to smaller businesses who really need to feel that impact.
According to David, there are two main reasons why Insights Discovery is, today, often the entry point for all new clients…
Insights Discovery easily integrates into organisations, changing perspectives and behaviours over the long term. The simplicity of the language used to describe each person’s behaviourial preferences (color energies) makes it easy to imbed in daily conversations.
While 3W Growth acknowledges that most people have a positive experience in most workshops, it’s the long-term stickiness of the Insights Discovery system that makes the difference.
For smaller businesses, this is really powerful because you get past the surface. If you stop people thinking about job titles and get to them to start thinking about individual preferences, they can support each other in a way that cuts across job titles. Tapping into preferences using color energy language allows smaller business to be much more productive and competitive.
The modular design of Insights Discovery workshops empowers 3W Growth to tailor each experience to the team at hand. Workshops can be delivered over a few hours or a few days, depending on the client’s goals, challenges, and the preferences of the leadership team.
Our clients prefer shorter workshops. We’ll do a team effectiveness workshop in 3.5 hours that a larger company might take two days to do. We've developed a quick module that’s just as impactful and that our clients appreciate because it keeps them free to manage their business.
Choosing to work with Insights as an official Insights partner has opened tremendous opportunities for 3W Growth’s clients to surge forward and realise their own business goals.
A great example of how 3W Growth has used the Insights language of color energy in service of a client is the successful digital agency, Nzime. When the world went digital in 2020, Nzime was forced to hire, scale and revamp their operations in a matter of months.
It was an all-hands-on-deck response that had David and Helen working in lockstep with Nzime’s executive team to keep the team engaged, agile and savvy.
By the end of 2023, Nzime had tripled its workforce and transformed its leadership model, all while protecting its culture and maintaining high engagement.
Insights Discovery gave us an effective language we could integrate into our client relationships to understand them better. Suddenly we were able to walk into a room at the board level – it might be with an owner or marketing director – and immediately get a feel for the client’s leading color energy and adapt how we approached the meeting to suit their communication style.Chris McGillan, Nzime Ltd.
3W Growth delivers an Insights Discovery workshop at UK company, Nzime
Perhaps one of the reasons 3W Growth was successful with Nzime was that 3W Growth was experiencing its own transformation. In their case, from startup to established power player in the industry.
From the moment Helen and David decided to open their doors, there was no question that their service offerings would be built on a partnership with Insights, and with Insights Discovery as their lead product.
But as well as providing an attractive roster of relevant programmes, Insights had a profound internal impact on the business.
At its heart, 3W Growth is a family business offering consulting and coaching to empower other SMEs to thrive, and in this way, are aligned with Insights own values.
Download the full 3W Growth case study today
When asked about the most important thing becoming an Insights partner has brought to Helen and David’s business, David’s answer is poignant. Referring to his son, he says,
“I went to every football match that he played in. I was the dad that could pick him up from school. I was able to spend time with him. That's been so precious to me. I couldn't put a value on what it’s allowed Helen and I to do, and how much it’s given us.”
