Selling, leading and influencing with purpose with Russell Wardrop

For 25 years, Russell Wardrop has been teaching the world how to sell, lead, and influence with purpose. As the CEO and co-founder of KWC Global, Russell has built a business that’s shaped leaders and sales professionals across the globe – from boardrooms in London to Fortune 500 firms overseas.

But behind every confident communicator lies a story of learning, grit, and reinvention. Russell’s journey is one of curiosity turned craft – of turning the art of conversation into a science of success.

This week, he shares what 25 years in business has really taught him – about people, leadership, and what it takes to stay relevant when the world won’t stop changing.

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Get to know Russell Wardrop

Based: Glasgow & London

My Favourite Business Book: Hmmmm… I prefer novels. Perfume, Patrick Suskind. But if you twist my arm, The 48 Laws of Power, Robert Greene. Put it by the bed and read a few pages every night.

My Podcast Recommendation: The Neitzche Podcast. Or if you want a mainstream one, listen to Gordon Ramsay’s blistering hour on The High Performance Podcast.

My Business Hero: It ain’t my dad it’s gotta be Brian Williamson, a serial entrepreneur who a decade ago changed how I think.

If I wasn’t a business owner I would of been: I have been an architect and an academic, so either of those.

Outside of the office you can find me: In the kitchen making frittata, watching sport on the big television. Or in Nardini’s Art Deco fish and chip emporium in Largs, on Scotland’s west coast, with my wife and co-founder Sharon McLellan.

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25 years in – was there ever a point you thought KWC Global wouldn’t make it? Was there anything that nearly broke the business, and how did you pull through?

There have been two existential moments: the financial crash of 2008 and 2020’s lockdown.

The crash meant few clients wanted presenting or networking skills, so we created a sales programme for professionals. As soon as clients woke up, that’s just what they needed. Rainmaker for Sales is now our lodestar programme and the Rainmaker Series was born out of the challenges we faced.

Lockdown took everything out the diary in the spring of 2020, it wasn’t a pivot it was annihilation. Then, boom! Zoom! Coincidentally our wedding tune. Zoom transformed us, thanks to some long-standing clients in the law sector and Deloitte, who put in a Rainmaker programme for 100 directors in early summer.

Our flipchart action learning style is perfectly suited to live virtual learning and we have moved a long way from presenting skills because of these crises.

Sales can often be seen as ‘the dirty word’ in business.

What’s the biggest misconception about selling – and how do you break that down in boardrooms?

That it’s a dirty word! I have the hash tag #SalesSolveEverything on my website and never tire of saying at awaydays. The fact they are at a terrific venue for two days, all expenses paid, is because of… sales!
And three other things:

1) Many need to get over the fact that they are in sales, so that’s what we cover first. What’s your attitude, how do your approach sales… and what are your excuses for not taking action?

2) Then they need to know it’s not about underhand tricks and techniques, it’s about skills and behaviours. Put simply, every professional can learn the skills and behaviours needed to become what we call rainmakers.
Now, like every endeavour, some will become so good they can play London’s Royal Albert Hall and others might be down the local pub on a slow Tuesday. But everyone can improve and if you’re a senior professional you simply must be a rainmaker.

3) Charm and charisma can be useful (but the latter a double-edged sword) when moving from the cocktail bar to the boardroom, but the trait I like most is doggedness. If you are organised and systematic and proceed until apprehended, you will get your chance because at some point someone will say yes to your 20-minute Zoom call. Then it’s all about your value proposition.

You’ve worked with some of the world’s biggest firms.

What’s the most surprising mistake you’ve seen leaders at the top still make?

At conferences, where I might do 90 minutes to 300 after lunch, I’ll will get to see some or all of the morning session.

I hear some very good speakers, but too many awful ones who are both ill-prepared and lack practise. It amazes me that a business will spend a fortune getting their people in a room (or a virtual townhall) and suck the life out of them.

Another bug bear is the “barstool chat” with the Big Cheese, which is usually done to save preparing a proper keynote. Folks, respect your people enough to prepare that keynote.

Leadership isn’t always glamorous.
What’s a tough truth about leading people that most CEOs don’t admit
publicly?

Jings, I think I’ve seen everything on LinkedIn and, while I admire the chutzpah of some for putting it all out there, some things should be between you and your counsellor. So I don’t know that I’ve anything new to say.
For me, it’s about being able to make the tough calls. And there is nothing surer that tough calls will come.

Personally, I am never more alive than when it’s time to put all your chips in the middle of the table and say “all in”: maybe I even like it a little too much.
I brought everyone back in the September of 2020 on a hunch that Zoom would be big, and we could be well-placed when many similar businesses were waiting. It’s not a decision others in the business would have made.

Since then we’ve more than doubled in size and are now global, hence the name change. The other thing about leadership is that often the best thing to do is…nothing! It’s amazing the number of things that just fizzle out without anyone trying to fix anything.

Global perspective:

Where have you found the most inspiring leadership cultures – and where have you seen the most resistance to change?

I work with a lot of business of different types in many locations, but it’s difficult to generalise. You always need those who are keen to go gangbusters and lead change AND the more conservative types who want to reign it in.

Balance, in other words. I’m a centrist in all things, which seems a pretty lonely place at times just now.

What I am sure of is that there are a few social revolutions underway in the workplace (and life); and they are happening at pace. Academics will be studying them right now, and will tell us about them in a decade or two.

Quarter of a century in consulting:

If you had to pick one brutal lesson that only 25 years in business could teach you, what would it be?

The 150k Rainmaker contract from Deloitte in June of 2020. The joy when it landed and the following few months of intense creativity, as all of us were reinventing how we did everything, was quite a ride.

And the team? Just splendid, all now have a stake in our future success.

Personal growth:

How has it felt being a CEO for 25 years? What was the greatest advice that you received along the way?

I have the best job in the world and have never worked a day in my life. Only one of those statements is entirely true, the other is 77% true.

Focus: Our first client asked us, on completion of Kissing With Confidence, our eponymous public speaking course, if we could deliver a time management course.

We could, but we didn’t, despite having no other work. That programme has been the foundation for our Art of Storytelling and Rainmaker for Pitches programmes. These have been delivered to hundreds of thousands of delegates globally and helped win billions of contracts for clients.

We have still never delivered a time management programme.

Forget day rate:

If you are stuck on day rate, every time you put it up you get a little more money for doing the same thing. Create programmes that deliver value via ROI, show that value to clients, charge what the programmes are worth. A game changing strategy.

Have a plan:

One of the first people I told about starting a business, a colleague in JCI, asked, “What’s the plan?” I went home that night and said to Sharon we needed a business plan.

We created one, got it reviewed by a few trusted friends, started Kissing With Confidence and won a Scottish Enterprise business plan competition that took us to Las Vegas and my first keynote in the MGM Grande.

Set targets:

In 2000 we set a target of 120k in year one, which seemed ridiculous as we had no clients and one untested programme. We made it, so doubled it in year two, and made that too.

Then, suddenly, we has a few employees, were working in London and income was over half a million. We have always set targets. As Seneca said, “If you don’t know where you are going, no wind is favourable.”

The future of sales & leadership:

What do you think will be obsolete in 10 years and what will never change?

At a conference in London recently I sat in on four AI presentations. If we are to believe the Big Cheeses in this sector all of us will soon be staying home, talking to avatars of many types, unable to tell if we are in a simulation.

I asked one of the humans, who opined that his avatar could increase sales outcomes by 40%, at what level of business this could be achieved. The answer, junior level, maybe mid-level.

So hold my beer, as the poet said. A lot of business and leadership and sales will still be done belly to belly and face to face. In fact, I reckon that, in the immediate future and probably in a decade, we are going to be craving more sticky and messy and kinetic real world experiences in our business lives and our personal lives.

Legacy:

When you look back at KWC Global in another 25 years, what do you want people to say it stood for?

I want KWC Global to stand for making a difference to hundreds of thousands of professionals the world over getting the skills and behaviours that will transform their lives.

I want to be stopped by a young professional, on my way from Zedel Brasserie in Leicester Square, heading to Phantom of the Opera as a celebration of my 87th birthday, who says, “I made partner because of your Rainmaker programme.”

I want the brilliant team we have now to still be making a difference by teaching that #SalesSolveEverything.