Set The Tone develops the management layer that lets you step back, keeps your best people, and turns a business that needs you in every decision into one that can grow without you in the room. Bespoke programmes, cohort training, and consulting for founders and leaders of growing businesses, typically 15 to 100 people.
You've built something real. Customers who stay, a team that's grown, people you'd hate to lose.
That's not a people problem. It's a management layer that was never built to hold the weight of a growing business. 82% of UK managers have never had any formal training. Yours probably haven't either.
When your management layer works, you stop being the constraint and start being the leader.
You stop spending your week solving problems your managers should be solving. They make the calls. You coach the calls.
Decisions stop routing through you. Managers hold their people accountable, give feedback that lands, and hire well without you in the room.
Retention goes up. Recruitment costs go down. Your best people stay and grow, instead of leaving because of a manager nobody trained.
Every engagement starts with a conversation about your business and what's getting in the way. Then we pick the right way in.
Your whole management layer, developed together, around the problems your business actually has.
Put one to three managers through structured development, without the bespoke commitment.
The people structures a growing business needs, built properly, for the messy middle.
Bespoke and Foundations participants also get the Set The Tone platform and community: short modules, templates and an AI coaching assistant. Currently in development.
Thirty seconds from a manager on our first cohort, on what changed with her direct report.
Leanne Buckley, Head of Customer Success, Twine · 30 sec
I would definitely put people on it. It's one of those things I wish I'd had years ago. I would have benefited, my team would have benefited, my employers would have benefited.Jack Richens · Senior Engineer, Base
I've already put so much of it into practice with my team, and it's made a real difference. Genuinely one of the most valuable courses I've done.Leanne Buckley · Head of Customer Success, Twine · via LinkedIn
A lot of leadership development can be quite fluffy. This was much more nuts and bolts. Very specific, tangible, implementable advice.Olivia · Account Director, PR Agency
We'll talk through your managers, where decisions get stuck, and what's getting in the way. You'll leave knowing whether one of these fits, or whether something else would serve you better.
Book a call →Same goal as everyone else: better managers. Very different way of getting there.
If the top doesn't buy in, the training won't stick. We'll tell you that up front.
Book a call →AI is already reshaping how work gets done. The managers who know how to use it - to coach, to decide, to delegate, to prepare - will be three times the operator their untrained peers are. The ones who don't will be left behind. And so will the businesses they run.
Every Set The Tone programme teaches your managers how to use AI as a leadership tool, not a task tool. And our AI tools give them coaching on demand, so they're never stuck on a hard conversation or a team problem alone.
I wasn't the founder. I was the exec the CEO relied on to build the management layer beneath him, inside a business that grew from 25 people to well over 100 and went through a private equity cycle while I was there. I started managing two people. I ended up leading 60 across seven services in five countries, and building the management teams that ran them.
I made every mistake in the book. Hired out of desperation. Avoided the hard conversations. Let small problems become crises because I didn't want to be "that" manager.
Two things fixed that. Before private equity, we sat inside a bigger group, so I got the structured leadership development most small businesses never see. Then I spent a decade putting it to work, training and coaching first-time managers as we grew. Everything here is built from that: what I wish someone had given me in year one, tested on dozens of managers since.
Set The Tone exists because most management training is written by people who've never managed a team through a hard year. This is the opposite.
Built for the managers underneath you. Forward them, or try them yourself first to see what your managers will see.
Where your managers are strong, where they're leaking time, and where they need to grow.
One short daily email on the moves that compound over a career.
Which styles your managers lead with, and which they're missing.
Preparing for, delivering and following up on the conversations most managers put off.
Five anonymous sentences that show whether your team feels able to speak up.
Management told through sport, politics and history. The email managers actually open.
Most aren't good enough yet. Let's change that.
Book a call →