Meet LRM’s speakers and trainers

Liz Harris, Director, Alchemy Training - Interpersonal Skills at Work. Liz has spent the last 16 years working with businesses to increase their competitive edge. She does this by training and coaching personnel at all levels, to improve their customer facing and colleague facing communication skills.

With a background in the Tourism and Financial Services industries, Liz has gained a reputation as a pragmatist when it comes to implementing training interventions. She defines her purpose as being 'to bring about sustained behavioural change'. Through her extensive experience, she brings a wealth of stories which illustrate her points, distilling complex ideas into ones which can be instantly transferred to the workplace.

Mark Lloydbottom specialises in planning and strategy in the area of firm marketing and management. His management programmes are based on over 30 years experience, partly as an accountant, and also as a consultant. Mark has worked with professional service firms in 7 overseas countries and has lectured throughout Europe and North America.

Mark was a practitioner for 20 years, starting his own practice in Bristol in 1978. He is the founder of the Association of British Independent Accounting Firms, Practice Track and PracticeWEB. Mark has also served on various committees with the Institute of Chartered Accountants, including the 2005 Working Party. He is devoted to researching and identifying strategies to enable accounting firms to build their top and bottom line. This is achieved by delivering high quality consulting and lecturing.

Mark is PracticeWEB's principal author, maintaining the site content for more than 750 accounting firms. He is always available to make speeches and consult on firm management and marketing. Mark is the author of DEFINING EDGE: Practice Management Strategies.

Patrick Bird, AMAC Is an Executive coach with a difference!  He works with individuals to improve personal and business performance, thereby increasing profitability, job satisfaction and individual confidence.

His unique background combines professional acting skills with senior business and financial experience in blue chip companies, underpinned by a diploma in performance coaching and a commitment to people development through interactive training and coaching.

He is a very experienced in the corporate sector at a high level as Finance and Project Director, initiating and directing major projects resulting in significant change.

After a corporate career of 30 years, Patrick spent 12 months at drama school and trained as a professional actor adding another dimension to his insight. He combines his corporate and coaching experience with creativity and a natural rapport building style.

Patrick has worked globally gaining extensive experience with major industrial organisations and professional firms in personal skills training and coaching.

He specialises in working with individuals and teams in the areas of personal impact, energy, use of the voice, body language and congruent messages to build good quality communication that is heard and remembered. Helping people and organisations to support outstanding technical competencies with outstanding communication skills.

Debra Copson, has been working in the field of Learning and Development for the last 18 years and has a vast wealth of experience. She has a passion for helping businesses and their people to realise their full potential, which she does by working closely with her clients to design and deliver bespoke solutions which offer real results and long term benefits. They cover a wide variety of skills development training and coaching programmes, all linked to performance output.

Debra has a background in Financial Services where, after graduating from Leeds University with a BSc Honours degree in Psychology, she began working in the City for an Investment House. This gave her a strong sales background, before moving into learning and development with a FTSE 100 financial services group where she worked closely with business partners, delivering Consultancy and Management training to a variety of audiences.

Matthew Parker has been involved in purchasing and procurement in a number of sectors for over twenty years, with a particular specialisation in the print and media industries.  He is still actively involved in purchasing projects in a consultancy capacity, including running tenders, assisting with e-procurement strategies, reviewing processes and service level agreements and evaluating suppliers.

Matthew has taken his understanding of the purchasing and procurement issues and has developed a number of training workshops which include procurement, sales, negotiating and customer services.  He has delivered these to a wide variety of audiences in different market sectors.

Matthew also speaks regularly on these topics at a variety of events.