Marlene Powell is making a difference in people’s businesses and in their personal lives. Thirteen years ago, she left her comfortable but strong role in the financial sector of the corporate world. This move allowed her to embark on a journey that has seen her turn people’s businesses around – achieving between 46% to in excess of 1000% growth.
As the first woman ActionCOACH franchisee in South Africa, and with more than 12 000+ coaching hours, Marlene has transitioned herself from a generalist to a specialist in her field. As an internationally certified business coach, she provides business help, business advice, business coaching and mentoring services to small and medium sized businesses.
She explains, “I loved entrepreneur and author, Brad Sugars, the founder of ActionCOACH’s vision.” After business owners were approaching him for business consultations, Sugars realised that the missing component between knowledge and implementation was coaching. Consequently, Sugars company Action International (now known as ActionCOACH) was born in 1993. ActionCOACH has grown to be one of the fastest growing franchises in the world and is the number one business coaching firm in the world.
Marlene’s personal brand is defined by precision in all that she does so it is not surprising that the Westville based franchise has consistently been placed in the Top 100 in the world. Marlene was also recently awarded the ActionCOACH Southern Africa Brand Personality 2021 Award at the annual ActionCOACH National Conference.
She commented, “The brand means everything to me, I live, breathe, eat and sleep it. The more business owners we can reach and touch out there, the more of a difference we can make in the world.” Her business background in the corporate world has seen her accomplish several major achievements in her field, which include graduating as an Associate in Management (Management Practice) through the Graduate School of Business at the University of Cape Town.
Marlene believes she is now living her dream, with strong support from her husband Geoff, and son Dylan who encouraged her to turn her dream into a reality. Says Marlene, “Either you can take ownership, accountability or responsibility to achieve your dreams, or you can find blame, excuses or be in denial... The choice is up to you.”
Marlene also attributes her success to discipline and consistency. “I have continued to focus on the positives; the vision and my purpose on why I became a coach. Helping people to achieve growth in their companies has helped me achieve growth in mine.” “As a business coach, I will help you deliver the results you desire using proven tools, methodologies and systems, tested and perfected over tens of thousands of businesses worldwide for over more than two decades. I will hold you accountable for your results and just like a sports coach, push you to perform at optimal levels.”
“As a business owner myself, I value quality of life – just like everyone else should. By implementing simple and practical tools into my clients’ businesses, I help them to create more money and time to allow them to enjoy the finer things in life. It inspires me to help people spend more quality time doing what they love doing.”
In addition, Marlene says that over her years of coaching that she has found that an effective business is especially relevant to personal relationships and to successful marriages. She asks, “Do you think that your relationships with your partner, your family or your friends are affected by not having enough time or enough money? It is important to ask how do we get the business to be the vehicle to give you time and money so that emotion is not built up though the inefficiencies of the business as a root cause.”
“Significantly, success revolves around the word action. We literally took a pact to take ACTION and help our clients to do the same. Results must be forthcoming or else what’s the point?” she concluded.
ActionCOACH Mission
ActionCOACH is a team of committed, positive and successful people who are always striving to be balanced, integral and honest. We will work within our “14 Points of Culture” to make sure that everyone who touches, or is touched by the ActionCOACH team, will benefit greatly and in some way move closer to becoming the person they want to be or achieve the goals they want to achieve.
We will always work in “coopetition” with all those who believe they are in competition with us. We are in the business of “Edutainment.” We will educate ourselves, our clients and all those whom we work with, while we entertain them and create a fun learning environment. We will educate our clients in world class marketing and business development techniques using audio, video, CDs, other technologies and simple workbooks, workshops, and seminar formats.
Our products and services will be of the highest quality, value for money and, whether sourced from within the company or externally, will always add the most value and use the latest and most effective training methodologies available. ActionCOACH clients, whether they are small, medium or large in size, will have a desire to have us help them in achieving their goals and be able to take on Our Commitment to them by returning their Commitment to ActionCOACH. They will be forward thinking, willing to learn and grow, and be willing to work as a team player in the development of an organization of ‘people’.
Our clients will be selected more on attitude than size and they will want to deal with us because we understand people are important, systems should run a company, we offer the most practical, most applicable and fastest strategies on growth, and most importantly, because we mean what we say. We will give people back their spirit and freedom through business development.