Who We Are
&SO is a collaboration between Stuart Sinclair & Olivia Blaylock.
Partners in life and in business, Stuart and Olivia until recently owned iconic business training company, David Forman for 12 years.
Working with many of Australasia’s leading businesses and SMEs, they have seen real-world best practice in action but have also done the hard yards themselves. They’ve bought a business that was losing money, rebranded it, reviewed services, launched new ones. They’ve hired brilliant people and made some poor recruitment decisions. They put the house on the line and taken services online. They’ve been an international licensee, a Regional Business Partner provider, and finally they’ve also successfully negotiated the sale of their business. All in all, there’s not many things in the business world that they haven’t experienced.
This experience combined with their complementary skills – Stuart likes to tell stories, while Olivia likes to get stuff done – they’re a good mixture of inspiration and action.
Stuart
Sinclair
You’ll struggle to find someone more passionate about developing people to grow your business than Stuart. A former university lecturer in advertising and marketing, Stuart truly believes that people are the 5th P of marketing.
Stuart is passionate about helping participants to discover and reach their potential and to improve organisational performance. His high energy and thought-provoking style engages, inspires and challenges people to develop their skills and lift their performance and results to new levels.
There’s not many industries Stu hasn’t worked with – construction, agriculture, professional services, manufacturing and wine – with some highlights being projects with Z Energy, Villa Maria, NZME, PlaceMakers and Genetic Technologies.
Olivia
Blaylock
A general manager, an award-winning marketer but through and through, Olivia is a bloody good salesperson.
Liv is a strategic thinker with an ability to identify opportunities that others can’t see and be innovative in her problem solving. In fact, it has become apparent to us over recent years that a real USP of Liv’s is an ability to cut through the clutter and quickly get to the heart of an issue – to see something for what it really is. Where others may have given up or thought something too hard, Liv is driven to try different ways and to challenging the status quo, taking calculated risks to find new solutions.
Before running the show at David Forman, Olivia held various sales and marketing positions in both the public and private sectors, including Mainfreight, Trade NZ, Telecom and the Child Cancer Foundation.
“Absolutely brilliant – engaging, relevant and enjoyable!”
PLACEMAKERS