ABOUT US

ECG MODEL

History

The concept of a small, staff friendly company was spawned in the Alps in 1994 while Peter Harvey was mountaineering with a friend. He was in his second year at University.

The motivation came from several directions not least his experience working in an Outdoor Education Centre, Strathcona Park Lodge, in Canada and with Outward Bound in Wales. However the driving force was to see if his idea of a staff-focused business would keep the team enthused and pay the salaries.

Having worked for several large centres Peter felt that mismanagement within outdoor companies was solvable despite the tight margins in which the industry operated. Therefore the primary ethos was to support staff and ensure that everyone remained motivated. Motivated staff would mean that customers were happy, staff felt valued and rewarded and would be keen to continue to work with us.

The ethos of the company has stayed constant throughout the years. We have remained staff focused and continue to work closely with clients designing bespoke quality programmes to meet their needs.

We have grown beyond expectations in four core business fields, youth development in the UK, worldwide youth development expeditions , corporate training, and medical training.

Business Structure

In common with most businesses, the company initially developed a traditional pyramidal hierarchy, with the staff working at the ‘coalface’ effectively supporting the management structure. This pyramid was soon inverted so as to place the management structure in support of the trainers delivering the company’s programmes and courses. This is central to the core ethos of supporting staff to maintain high motivation and commitment.

Within the ‘inverted’ hierarchy, the business flourished and developed four distinct business streams, catered for by four separate companies within the business structure: Wilderness Expertise, Wilderness Expertise Training , Training 4 Expertise, and Medical Expertise. Each company focused on delivering its own specialist products:

Wilderness Expertise: Overseas Personal Development Expeditions for young people – predominately school groups

Wilderness Expertise Training: UK based Personal Development courses and programmes for young people

Medical Expertise: UK and Overseas First Aid Training and consultancy

Training 4 Expertise: UK and Overseas based Corporate Training

There was an inherent weakness with this pyramid hierarchy model, whether inverted or not, in that it is reliant on all four companies maintaining viable levels of business. There is little flexibility in being able to accommodate fluctuations in revenue or changes in the market. Downturn in one company can have significant impact across the whole structure. This lead to the development of the ECG Business Model.

ECG Business Model

The ECG Business Model is centred on an aspiration to create an environment or atmosphere in which small, specialist companies could successfully develop alongside the core ethos of ensuring that staff are motivated to deliver exceptional, high quality programmes and courses.

Expertise Consultancy Group (ECG) provides an atmosphere capable of sustaining development. A central ‘hub’ contains ‘nutrient’ business support services such as business and financial management, resources, office space and vehicles.

A number of ‘satellite’ business units orbit within the atmosphere, linked to the ‘hub’ by an ‘umbilical cord’, through which the ‘nutrients’ essential to maintain sustainability are drawn.

Each business unit has a clearly defined product range which it provides to the ECG client base. The different business units broadly reflect the product split from the old pyramidal hierarchy, but with increased specialisation:

Wilderness Expertise (WE): Overseas Personal Development Expeditions for young people – predominately school groups

UK Short Courses (SC): UK Personal Development Courses for School Groups

Behavioural Educational and Enrichment Programmes (BEEP): Longer term Personal Development programmes for young people, including Pupil Refer Units

Outsourcing (OS): Outdoor Activity Provision for Schools

Training 4 Expertise (T4E): Personal Development, Hard SkillsTraining and Consultancy for Corporate Groups Organisations and Adults

Medical Expertise (ME): UK and Overseas First Aid Training and Consultancy

Event Expertise: Event facilitation and consultancy

Resources: Equipment and resource management

Each of these business units has strong linkage with the others within ECG – sharing clients, resources and expertise. This network serves to bond the whole group together.

Benefits

This new structure is very flexible and allows the company as a whole to accommodate fluctuations in revenue in the different business units, without impacting on the overall viability of ECG. Additionally, it allows the company to develop new business streams as opportunities are identified. These fledgling business units can be nurtured until such time as they move into profitability and longer-term commercial viability.

A secondary benefit to the restructure has been to implement an additional level of personal development within the team of ECG employees. Formerly employed as trainers, a number of individuals within the company have now taken on the role of satellite business managers. Others have taken up roles within the ‘hub’ as resources on which the business units can draw as required. Within ECG, every employee has direct control over the way in which they work and thus ‘control their own destiny’.

Future Development

The development of the ECG model is a function of the individual business unit’s success in their markets and the rate at which individual business unit mangers can achieve a level of ability that reduces the draw on business and financial management from the ‘hub’. Once a business unit moves into a position of sustainability, the ‘hub’ will then focus on developing additional business units – encouraging further growth within the network of ECG.