Simon Roskrow

is our managing director, and the lead trainer on the majority of courses. Simon brings a huge range of experience from an enormous range of sources; from Blue Chip business, to top end consultancy, to small business entrepreneurship. To this he adds equally impressive expertise in training foundations and learning innovations. Simon takes this unique mix to explore, design, and create truly inspirational training courses.

Simon has a successful big business career behind him in consultancy, sales, finance and production; so he appreciates first hand the need for real results from any training investment. Simon is also a training polymath, qualified in the firm foundations like NLP and Myers Brigg, while able to bring training innovations using concepts like Game Theory. This means Simon is quick to understand your business need and integrate the right training theory to fit. Finally Simon's major passion is for outdoor adventure, in learning life by doing, and not just reading. He brings this ethos into his courses, creating training that focusses on experiencing and exploring change. If you want a training folder to gather dust on a shelf, go somewhere else; if you want training that delivers intuitive change, give him a call. It is no wonder that 80% of the Simon's business is from very happy clients returning for more.

Biog

Simon grew up in Yorkshire (which will always remain his spiritual home) until leaving to attend the University of Bristol. There, he succeeded in getting a 1st class BSc in Economics & Politics.

Whilst at university, Simon spent a summer working for Shell UK, in the beautiful Shell Mex House on The Strand in central London. His role was a strategic analysis of forecourt services, with particular focus on the impact of environmental legislation and water restrictions (drought orders) on the car wash business.

Following the successful completion of this project, Simon was invited back for another six-month project, this time in the international headquarters, Shell Centre. His role was to interpret, review, develop and create plans based on Europe-wide market research into the brand image and identity. This involved working with many local research agencies across Europe in order to gain a full understanding of the results of the data and the practical implications, in order to propose changes on report on a country-by-country basis.

Simon spent the second six months of the year with Procter & Gamble, in their F&A - financial analysis - department (of whom, more later). It was here that Simon started to understand and appreciate the importance of training and development. This assignment resulted in a job offer upon completion of his degree.

On graduation, Simon was lured away from taking up his role with P&G by the bright lights and glamour of a job in the City of London, working in mergers and acquisitions for J Henry Schroder & Co. He spoke to the then sales director of P&G UK, Andrew Garden, who, with great insight, said that he thought the wrong decision was being taken, and to keep his number to call when realisation dawned.

Despite an exciting, challenging, and extremely hard work period at Schroders, which included working on the floatation of the Woolwich Building Society, debt raising for the Royal Mail, a hostile takeover of a US life assurance business and the dismantling of an overstretched conglomerate, Andrew’s prediction came true, and Simon made the call back to P&G. They welcomed him with open arms, and a P&G career was born.

Starting in the Customer Business Development (sales to non-P&G’ers) department, Simon’s was first given responsibility to look at the impact for P&G’s trade terms of the Tesco take-over of Quinnsworth in Ireland. This complex work led to Simon being the pricing and trade terms expert and consultant for Ireland, right up until the business began to be managed directly by a new P&G team on the ground in Dublin.

Simon’s progression through sales took him from the “school of hard knocks” training ground of managing independent retailers in south London, through to managing national account business with Lloyds Pharmacy, Safeway and Waitrose.

Eventually though, the call from Yorkshire became too great, and Simon requested a move to the Harrogate office. This came through in the year 2000, and Simon spent very good times working in sales, and then back in finance as the finance manager for the UK Asda/Wal*Mart business. Throughout this time he had hands on experience managing people and teams, in company that demands people to be great trainers as well as great business leaders.

This team management skill was then stretched in a new direction with his move to financial management of a large production facility in Manchester. This was one of the toughest roles, as the primary aim was cost reduction, through (as we managed it) voluntary redundancies. Again, training and people management were a key part of the role, in addition to providing fantastic nitty-gritty experience of 24/7 production facilities and detailed financial management and planning.

Unable to offer Simon a role back to Yorkshire, where his heart still was, there then came a very amicable, if rather sad, parting with P&G. So in 2006, Simon set up his first training company, offering experiential learning to a wide range of clients, from blue chip though to medium (and even small, but growing and dynamic) organisations, in the public, private and third sectors. He quickly found he loved building expertise across training theories, but was also soon taking these ideas outside to explore them with outdoor exercises. This continues apace now with the creation of trainingreality, designed and run to deliver the very best, practical, and real training imaginable.