He’s an entrepreneur who likes getting things done—and inspiring other people to get things done.

David is convinced that a large part of his ability to get others to take action is simply due to his own passion for the things he’s involved in—as a business owner, as a leader in his industry, and as a volunteer in the community.

This enthusiasm is what first led him to coaching. “It seemed like a fun thing to do,” he says. He particularly enjoys the boisterous, no-nonsense atmosphere of the Strategic Coach® workshops he leads in the U.K.— and the feeling is mutual: One client in the Program came up to him after their session and said with relief, “You’re a normal bloke!” As a coach, David simply speaks from his experience and shares how he applies the tools and concepts in his own business. Both the challenges and the results are instructional.

“I tend to use all my own examples—about my business, my family—because I feel that helps us connect. I like the idea of saying to people, ‘Don’t make this mistake. Do it this way, because if you do it this way, you’ll have phenomenal results. Learn from somebody else’s mistakes rather than your own!’” He laughs, saying, “I spend a lot of time explaining my mistakes, because there are a lot there.”

He might be humble about the hard lessons he’s learned, but David’s success speaks for itself. He has become a leading figure in the U.K.’s financial services community as the owner of Wills & Trusts Independent Financial Planning, and is also gaining a reputation for showing other advisors how to survive RDR (a coming change in government regulations that will drastically affect the way advisors get paid) and come out with a stronger practice than before.

David estimates that, as a result of the transition he’s made in his own business to insulate it from these changes, nearly half the work he does for his financial services clients doesn’t actually involve financial services. He’s able to provide insight that extends beyond his field, partly because the principles he’s sharing are universal, and perhaps also because he hasn’t always been a financial planner.

In his teens, David was a professional drummer, but you can’t get a mortgage as a drummer, so he got a job in a bank and played drums at night. David soon found himself becoming better known for banking than for drumming. He worked his way through several businesses until a relative left him an inheritance—small, but enough for him to start his own business.

“I immediately made loads of mistakes and lost lots of money,” he jokes, but he put the lessons to good use and gradually developed a highly successful multi-million-pound practice.

In 1998, David attended the annual Million Dollar Round Table meeting, where he discovered Strategic Coach. He’d long been a believer in the power of investing money not just to survive, but also to develop, so he signed up for the Program.

Today, his investment continues to produce dividends, as every year of the Program is paid for—and then some—by new ideas he’s generated in his workshops. One idea alone earned £85,000. This powerfully reinforces his commitment to personal and professional development. “When times are tough—and we all go through tough times, no matter how successful our business is—the business goes up and down, the economy goes up and down. It can be very easy to forget what you’ve got from something,” David says.

David’s business continues to expand, but he’s focusing in more and more tightly on doing just what he enjoys most. “One of my long-term goals,” he says, “is to have a self-running company, one where all the income comes in without you being involved.” David continues, “I remember when we got to the point when all the overhead was being met from latent income. It was a great feeling, and I want to develop this further.”

David says that one of the great advantages of developing a strong business is that he can spend time in the other important areas of his life. “For each of the last three years, I have raised money for the Bobby Moore Cancer Fund, as well as traveling to Africa and Brazil, where I have got my hands dirty building schools for the local community. I’ve found that doing this keeps me grounded—and grateful for what I have. It’s too easy just to give money.”

It is this way of thinking that has led David to now having four different businesses, with only one involving financial services. He feels this diversification has improved the security of the businesses. “It has also meant that I can get back to doing my first love, jazz drumming, which I now do with two of my own bands.”

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[Download] PDF version of David Batchelor’s Coach Story.