Alex MacPhail is a passionate and compelling motivational speaker. His great expertise is empowering large audiences to master their motivation – allowing them to achieve their full potential, both on the day of the conference and long into the future. Alex wasn’t always a success. Until his teens he... Read more
Alex MacPhail is a passionate and compelling motivational speaker. His great expertise is empowering large audiences to master their motivation – allowing them to achieve their full potential, both on the day of the conference and long into the future.
Alex wasn’t always a success. Until his teens he had barely achieved a thing. But by the age of 18 he was thriving as a commodities broker and earning a healthy – or, he admits, “probably unhealthy” – six-figure income. This high-pressure experience led Alex to create a direct sales organisation that grew quickly to an annual turnover of £10m.
In seeking to bolster his troops, he became a voracious reader of American motivational books. He set out to discover what it would take to produce that little extra? What was ‘the difference that makes the difference’? How could he create a strategy to optimise the motivation of his people and, in turn, boost the performance and profitability of his business?
Alex MacPhail was particularly drawn to the work of two American ‘gurus’ – Anthony Robbins and Dr Stephen Covey (“The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People”) – both huge in the States at the time but largely unknown in the UK. Alex was so convinced that British audiences would benefit from their material that he visited them in the United States and acquired exclusive licences to bring them to the UK. This resulted in Alex promoting a series of mammoth events to sell-out audiences of up to 3,000 people.
His close association with Covey and Robbins led Alex to create his own training company to make this kind of material available – and palatable – to the UK corporate marketplace. This he has achieved with dramatic success, as the company he co-founded now works with some 300 UK companies and around 40,000 delegates a year.
Alex MacPhail describes his work as “Attitudinal, behavioural training” and he shares his unique knowledge and experience through high-energy and amusing keynote speeches, which he delivers at upwards of 100 events a year.
Alex describes his philosophy as follows: “The key question is this: What is the difference between the top 10% of performers in your company and the remaining 90%? The answer, I believe, has very little to do with technical skill, or core abilities, but it has a lot to with their mental attitude. My goal is to equip the 90% with the positive attitudes and empowering beliefs that distinguishes the peak performers, and the leadership skills to be able to communicate them to their teams.”
Alex can finish his presentation with a board break, which is a compelling visual metaphor for breakthroughs in performance.