Reflections of the past 2 Decades . .

If you are reading this blog, then you are likely to be a person who is familiar with Alive & Kicking Solutions and our team.  So I am writing directly to you ~ to share my feelings of gratitude and to say “Thank You for the adventure”!

I am both humbled and excited about the fact that this year represents 20 years of service to people and organisations. It’s truly a privilege to be able to work with the thousands of individuals and the hundreds of organisations who have found our services to be useful in their business and personal lives.

As I reflect on the past 20 years, I realise what an incredible journey this has been, and I wanted to share some of those musings with you.

The journey began in 1998, in Sydney, with two other business partners.  We were all searching for some way to add value to the lives of others, and to do meaningful work.   Like the growth of a child, the business was in its infancy.   We explored lots of possibilities and business angles – and finally decided that building a company that focused on human interaction would be our best approach.   We had a great many failures in getting started, though we had some critical successes that would see us have the ability to continue on the journey.

Just two years in, we were given the opportunity to provide training and consulting to a company in Western Australia.   This started out as a 6-week contract ~ and ended up evolving into a 14-year relationship.   This is one of the defining chapters in our story!  We realised that our skills and talents lend themselves to long term relationships that would outlast most other consultancies.  This fact remains today as one of our hallmarks and points of difference in our field.   The other differentiating factor became our delivery and consulting style.  The best way to describe it is Edu-tainment! 

We wanted people to FEEL something wonderful.   We wanted to create an EXPERIENCE that would stick with people forever and give them something that could help them in a long-term and sustainable way.

Trust me ~ there is nothing more potent than feedback from a participant who says:  “I was in the hospital having a severe asthma attach, and I remembered some of the relaxation techniques you taught us.  I used it, and it saved my life!”

In 2001, we moved our corporate headquarters from Sydney to the splendour of Western Australia.  We’ve never looked back!  In 2009, I became the sole owner of the Alive & Kicking Solutions, and the other two business partners went on to discover new fields of interest and a new journey for themselves.

From our humble beginnings we began to attract attention overseas. 

To date we have conducted our unique training programs in 7 countries and delivered to well over 50,000 participants.

Not all parts of the journey have been fun and rosy though.  We’ve had some whopping challenges that have seen us come close to folding several times.  What those challenges have given us, though, is wonderful.   We realised that we absolutely had to practice what we preach in order to survive.  We had to handle stress well, we had to be nimble and flexible, we had to learn to change with the times, and we had to really listen to our customers when they said they needed something new and different.

We teach resilience, emotional intelligence, creativity, strategic thinking, communication skills, and we had to be masterful in our own application of all of these things.

Today, we have come into our adulthood!  We are still Alive & Kicking ~ and I can’t wait to see what stories we will have to tell at the ¼ Century mark and beyond!