This week’s featured member Claudia Lantos

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This week, our featured member Claudia Lantos tells us about her own leadership development & coaching firm, Lantos Coaching & Consultancy. We asked Claudia about who her clients are and what she can offer them.

Claudia Lantos, executive coach
Claudia Lantos, executive coach

Who are your clients?

Our clients are usually organisations operating in a highly competitive market or dealing with continuous change or disruption. We work with both individual executives and teams.

For individuals, we can help them to:

  • become more effective
  • break with old patterns and habits and improve their personal positioning
  • establish more effective management behaviour
  • undertake organisational alignment
  • transition into a new role
  • excel in stakeholder management, and
  • enhance their performance and lead better-performing teams.

We also work with teams, both at executive leadership level and the level(s) below and can assist with:

  • newly formed teams
  • teams experiencing disruptive changes and organisational realignment
  • teams which need to become more collaborative and improve their performance and
  • teams which need to adjust to a new workplace culture.

Who do you think most benefits from LCC’s services?

Senior executives, emerging leaders and teams alike benefit from partnering with us. We offer best in class program frameworks, methodologies and assessments – all evidence based and with proven effectiveness.

What makes LCC stand out from other coaching businesses?

From briefing to delivery, LCC provides a quick turnaround time. As we are a boutique firm, we can accelerate effectively for our clients.

LCC has four key business principles:

  • All our programs are highly customised and tailored to our clients’ specific needs – we don’t believe in a ‘one size fits all approach.’
  • Our broad range of specialties, industry knowledge and experience mean we understand our clients, whether they are in the private, public sector or non-government sector.
  • We don’t shy away from giving you our best advice, even if this means sometimes needing to ‘tell it like it is’. My Dutch background might be the reason 🙂
  • We try to lift our game every time and keep coming up with new approaches and fresh perspectives.

What services does LCC offer?

We offer various kinds of evidence-based coaching including:

  • Executive Coaching programs
  • Assessments and debriefs
  • Leadership Development programs and workshops
  • Team Coaching
  • High Performance Team programs
  • Culture Change programs.

What is your vision and mission for LCC?

LCC’s vision is to encourage and challenge our clients to be the best versions of themselves. This might relate to an individual or a team’s performance and effectiveness, or a changing organisation or culture.

Our mission is to make sure we deliver high quality and highly customised services with direct impact for the client, by sharing our own best practices and let our clients benefit from the combined wealth of experience of our team.

Where does LCC operate?

While we are based in Sydney, we operate throughout Australia. We also offer our executive coaching services via video calling platforms like Skype and FaceTime for executives who are travelling or are based overseas.

How successful are your approaches?

The feedback we get from clients is that we really understand them and their needs. As evidence of this, we have clients coming back to us and referring others to us.

We know you started out in The Netherlands working as a lawyer in labour law. How did you end up working as a coach in Australia?

I’ve called Australia home for the last five years. Prior to that I was working in Europe and South-East Asia. I transitioned from labour law into recruitment and executive search, as part of the national management team of a stock-exchange-listed recruitment group, so I worked both in Amsterdam and Singapore. In that role, I was responsible for opening up new markets and building teams.

Before I moved to Sydney, I had my own coaching business in the Netherlands for 8 years. In my latest venture LCC – Lantos Coaching & Consultancy I try to implement my previous learnings and share best practices with both my clients and my team.

What is it you like about owning your own coaching company?

I really love to empower people. Whether they are my clients, organisations I work with or my own team. Of course you have to love business development, which I do, so I decided to continue my entrepreneurship here in Australia. I find it exciting to inspire my clients to set goals and help them achieve them and becoming more effective. I also set goals for myself and practice what I preach. I’m proud to say that LCC is already going from strength to strength.

Tell us about the team at LCC

Soon after I founded LCC, I asked six high calibre coaches and facilitators with whom I’ve been working together on assignments in the past, to join me. The team, all of whom had also held senior executive roles in the past, bring a complementary range of specialisations, skills and experiences to our coaching practice.

While we often work as individual coaches, for bigger Leadership Development Programs, we team up in pairs or even larger groups – whatever is required to meet the needs of our clients. We pride ourselves on the flexibility of our approaches.

How can people get in touch with you?

You can find me on the Executive Coach Exchange website or you can contact me directly on 0449102060 or by email at lantoscoaching@gmail.com or at www.lantoscoaching.com.

Cutting edge coaching

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Here at Executive Coach Exchange we were delighted to be given the task of coaching an entire team at the Centre for Aboriginal Health.

The Centre, which is part of NSW Health, asked us to work with all the staff there who wanted to participate and we were so pleased that they did. The Centre is developing a reputation for innovative approaches to professional development and we feel privileged to have played a part in this.

The Centre undertakes very effective advocacy for Aboriginal Peoples and is excited by the challenges presented by new strategic approaches in Aboriginal Health. The decision to coach the whole team was based on the belief that each person in the team contributes to the outcomes of the whole team, so each person should be supported to perform at their best.

The Centre has a coherent and cohesive leadership team, who have a strong commitment to the vision of the Centre, to quality improvement and to achieving better outcomes. This commitment is shared by the staff who also share with them a strong appetite to find new and better ways of doing business.

Coaching the entire team meant a significant investment in staff time, as all staff, irrespective of how long they had worked with the Centre or what their role was, were invited to participate.

By expanding coaching from the leadership team to the entire team, the Centre provided staff with the opportunity to build skills in a completely personalised program. This is paying dividends already. We found that staff engaged enthusiastically in the opportunity provided by the coaching program and tried new ways of working as a result. We were impressed and pleased to witness the improvement in work practices and the excitement and energy of the team in trying new ideas.

The Centre for Aboriginal Health is to be congratulated for this program. While executive coaching for leaders and aspiring leaders is becoming well-accepted across the NSW Public Sector, the idea of investing in this type of professional development for an entire team is at the cutting edge of coaching.

Are you setting up an executive coaching business?

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Executive Coach Exchange startup pixabay startupstockphotosAs well as thinking about potential clients, possible business partners and areas of specialisation, executive coaches who are starting up a new business need to consider some key areas that are relevant to all new businesses.

 

– Structure – Sole trader, partnership, trust or company? You need to think about which structure is best for your new business.  Here is a useful link.

– Company – If you decide on a company, remember to check the personal services income rules for tax purposes.  You will need to meet ASIC requirements to register your company and consider who will act as director, public officer and company secretary.

– Insurance – Before you start, ensure you will have adequate insurance in place to cover key liability.  For an executive coach business, this may include public liability and professional indemnity.  Workers compensation may also be required.  You can discuss this with an insurance broker.

– Business name – Register your business name before you begin to trade. However, registering a business name does not give you any intellectual property rights in the name.  For that, you need a trade mark – see below.  Also, you need to make sure your business name will not infringe someone else’s trade mark.

– Domain names – Consider registering your business name and variations, including .com.au, .net.au and other suffixes.  As for business names, registering a domain name does not give you any intellectual property rights, and you need to check that you do not infringe another trade mark.

– ABN – Apply for an ABN once you’ve determined that this will be a business not a hobby and have met the requirements for an ABN. A company or partnership will also need its own TFN.

– GST – Decide whether you need to register for GST and check the turnover threshold.  If you do not register for GST, you are not entitled to charge a GST component and your invoices need to reflect this. Here is a useful link.

– Finance – How will you fund the initial business expenses, such as regulatory expenses, insurance, equipment and supplies?  Ensure that you have a business plan in place that covers issues including finance, and tax and accounting input. This is particularly important if you will have a business partner, to set out each person’s responsibilities in the business.

– Marketing & advertising – Your business plan should also cover how you will market and advertise your business to help you grow.  Will you engage a marketing specialist?  If so, ensure that an appropriate contract is in place protecting your IP and confidential information.

– Records – Set up your systems for accurate records for tax and compliance.

– Privacy – Check the thresholds for whether you need a privacy policy and implement your privacy compliance systems.

– Employees & consultants – Ensure that you have agreements in place (including protection for your IP and confidential information) and appropriate tax and accounting input, as well as workers compensation insurance. You’ll also need to look at SuperStream compliance requirements for employees.

– Trade marks – Only a trade mark registration will protect your brand name. You should apply at the beginning of the process, not after you have already invested years of marketing into a name that turns out to belong to someone else!

If you would like help with any of these issues to establish your new business, contact influence legal.

 

Contributor:  Elizabeth Burrows is a founding partner of Executive Coach Exchange and director of influence legal.