The Alternative Board Wakefield District

Simon Banks is a facilitator and business coach for The Alternative Board Wakefield region. Simon’s background is in management for a larger organisation and SME ownership, and he continues to run his own successful manufacturing business in West Yorkshire.

He has over thirty years of sales and business management experience and decisive leadership, organisational, and planning skills developed while working in the manufacturing sector both in a larger organisation as a senior manager and shareholder and, more recently, as the owner of an SME business. 

Simon has continued to develop his skill set through the steep challenges faced when starting and growing a manufacturing business. He sees the support, advice and guidance from his coach and peers as a longstanding member of The Alternative Board as critical to the progress of his business.

Simon decided to use his TAB membership experience to help other business owners in his community develop and achieve their visions for themselves and their businesses after accomplishing his vision for his own manufacturing business with the help of TAB.

Tim Calverley, MABRP, is a facilitator for The Alternative Board Wakefield region. Tim’s background is as a professional business turnaround and restructuring consultant.

He has over 30 years of experience in dealing with businesses of all shapes and sizes going through significant trauma and facing the possibility of going out of business. He has held partner and senior roles at national firms of accountants and is a qualified Insolvency practitioner. He can quickly spot things going wrong and implement clear plans to ensure this does not happen.

Having this length of time dealing with distressed businesses, Tim turned his attention to consultancy and helping companies in a more positive light through growth plans to sustainability. Tim joined TAB as a member and has gained lots of support and help from his peers; becoming part of the team and adding even more tools to his toolkit by facilitating peer boards seemed the natural progression on his journey.

There is not much in business that Tim hasn’t seen during his time, and if he doesn’t have the answer, he will know someone who does. Hopefully, this will happen more through the peer board groups he facilitates.

Douglas Brown is an Alternative Board facilitator and business coach for the Wakefield region. He has a wide range of commercial experience, much of it gained in the Financial Services sector in both small business and large corporate environments in various consulting and sales management roles. Douglas also ran his own successful personal wealth consultancy for over ten years.

He has extensive sales and business management experience and solid organisational and communication skills developed during time spent, most notably with the British Medical Association and Wealth Management provider St. James’s Place. He has a particular interest in sales development and enabling top performance.

Graduating with a degree in Economics, Douglas Brown has underpinned his practical business experience with professional qualifications, including certificates in business coaching. 

He is a qualified trainer of Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP). He is interested in the applications that this field of knowledge can offer in business, leadership, behavioural change and performance improvement.

Douglas’s real passion is in performance improvement, getting results and helping businesses and individuals focus on what matters most and the key goals that will enable achieving full potential. His role with the Alternative Board allows him to do precisely that.