Research

Cotoco Chairman, Professor Colin Coulson-Thomas, runs the world’s largest ongoing research programme into winning behaviours. Over 4,000 organisations from smaller firms to major corporations have participated. Over 2,000 of these took part in the extensive research programme, which identified critical success factors and winning behaviours for important activities; and practical experience of helping innovative companies to incorporate them into work processes and job support tools that enable users to emulate the approaches of high achievers. The productivity of key workgroups and corporate performance can be transformed to deliver commercial success for organisations and personal satisfaction for individuals.

Cotoco harnesses the research by building critical success factors into Mentor24x7 to help all their customers perform like winners. The award-winning Mentor24x7 is used by many successful companies in a wide range of industry sectors including business communications; the chemical industry; engineering and manufacturing; financial services; IT and telecoms sector and the print sector.

Experience

Cotoco comprises a team of dedicated and experienced staff and many have been with the company since it was formed. Some staff come from a mix of traditional training and e-learning backgrounds and together with highly skilled and experienced technical support, such as programmers and software engineers, the team offer the best blend of skills required for any project we undertake.

Our Chairman

Dr. Colin Coulson-Thomas was the world’ first Professor of Corporate Transformation and is currently Professor of Direction and Leadership at the University of Lincoln. He is an internationally experienced chairman of award winning companies and an active international business consultant.

Colin has advised over 100 boards to help them develop their businesses, reviewed the processes and practices for winning business for over 100 companies and spoken at over 200 national and international conferences in some 35 countries.

He leads the Winning Companies; Winning People research programme which identifies critical success factors for key corporate activities and what high performers do differently within processes that are vital for corporate success. These factors are built into Mentor24x7. Colin is the author of over 40 books and reports including ‘Winning Companies; Winning People - making it easy for average performers to adopt winning behaviours’ (Policy Publications, 2007).

Colin was educated at the London School of Economics and the London Business School and was the world’s first Professor of Corporate Transformation.

Our MD

Don Fuller is Managing Director of Cotoco and principal visionary behind the award-winning Mentor24x7.

Graduating from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1979, Don joined the sales and marketing department of Esso Chemicals. Pioneering the use of microcomputers, he created computer models to predict the profitability of customer chemical plants.

In the mid-eighties, Don wrote successful educational games for the BBC microcomputer and some of the first software to be bundled with the Amstrad machine. At one point there were over 1 million copies of his titles in circulation.

As the PC gained a foothold, Don moved on to develop large-scale e-learning applications for banks and insurance companies. His designs were renowned for their ‘imagination and flair’ and for ‘bringing dry banking subjects to life’. He was recognised with an international IFCEB award.

Since then, Don has focussed on building a dedicated and experienced team specialising in the creation of toolkits to equip people to adopt the behaviours and techniques used by top performers. The first company to deploy this new methodology tripled its business in less than two years and was subsequently bought out by Lucent. As MD, Don has overseen the replication of this initial success throughout a wide range of industry sectors - see Proof.

Our Director

Dr Paul Burr is a director of Cotoco. He has vast experience in Corporate Business Coaching and Top-Performer Modelling, in three areas:

• equipping executives to achieve complex business strategies,
• helping people to increase their impact and influence;
• rolling out what top performers do differently from everyone else.

Dr Burr started his career by undertaking the IBM Post-Graduate Programme. He became an IBM salesperson, where he was promoted to Corporate Marketing Manager for the BT account, which then represented 10% of IBM UK’s revenue stream. He exceeded targets, 11 years straight.

In 1993, Dr Burr joined The Forum Corporation, a global training and consulting firm, where (as Director for Corporate Accounts) he became the top performer in Europe in his first year.

In 1996, as a Principal for Wentworth Research (now part of Gartner Group), Dr Burr built new-business sales processes, territory and account management systems, go-to-market models - inculcating new business measures, and the mentoring/training of fellow account managers. He designed a “sale on first call” process that brought in clients including NatWest, BP, Cable & Wireless and Bristol & West.