Interview with the Founder: Nick Booth

It’s just another day in this pandemic-ridden world when I open my laptop and click on that all too popular Zoom icon. It’s for an interview with Nick Booth, the founder and director of Seventh-Wave®, the very one you are reading about right now. In other circumstances, this would be in person, face to face, with no risk of lagging or bad internet connection, but for now, this is what we all must work with. 

For a training company who specialises in helping people, mostly in training rooms full of excited, eager attendees, this change could have a huge effect on the running of the business. These changes may put pressure on the values held at the core of the company, but this is not the case for Seventh-Wave®. The company was born out of a ‘pure and unfaltering belief that every single human being has the ability to become the best they can be’, as Nick puts it. This is the foundation of the company, and despite the recent changes in the world, it remains the same. Nick came upon the business idea, which he describes as a natural ‘spin-off’ from his previous experience, from a 23 year career in various retail positions, having managed ‘more than 10,000 people’. His main passion in this sector was improving teams, and encouraging the best engagement possible to ensure great company-wide results (a model endorsed by his last retail employer, B&Q), and so it was only natural that once the ‘epiphany’ occurred that this could become a full-time career, he went for it. 

“We have a pure and unfaltering belief that every single human being has the ability to become the best they can be”

It began with volunteering with various training companies on his days off to learn the skills, and then an 18 month course to get a qualification: something he deemed ‘quite intense, but good fun’. At the time, the goal was to try to be ‘all things to all people’, and it wasn’t long before he realised this wasn’t the right model for him. It was at that point that he recruited a friend, who happened to be a coach, to help narrow the idea down to a ‘single product that, when I wake up at 2 in the morning and think about it, it gives me goosebumps’. It was from this statement that the concept of 6 workshops, so as not to be a ‘throwaway’ experience, and a focus on developing the skills of new leaders, with the goal of moulding them into a ‘credible member of their leadership team’, became solidified: the bare bones of Seventh-Wave® were there. The name came fairly organically, with the 6 workshops reminding Nick of the novel Papillon, in which the main character watches the waves to discover that the seventh is always the one that hits the shore. Put alongside the 6 workshops, and the desire to encourage long-lasting change afterwards, this name encapsulated everything the company stood for. 

So, the mission hasn’t changed. Nick’s main focus when starting Seventh-Wave® was to ask the question, ‘how can I help as many people as possible?’. The way in which this can be realised may change over time, especially recently. Right now, this ethos has been adapted by offering many more virtual workshops, to maintain the reach Seventh-Wave’s® training can have. Such changes as this are necessary, and Nick notes that, over time, they have ‘changed the dynamic, so we can help even more people’. However, even though alterations have had to be made in various forms since its inception, this core value of Seventh-Wave® has stayed the same. 

“Seventh-Wave® isn’t there to be the reason for an individual’s growth: that person has had this potential in them all along”

There is a true selflessness to the attitudes help by Seventh-Wave®, stemming from Nick. He tells me that his coaching mantra is, ‘I will coach you and help change your life for the better, and you will forget who I am’. Now, he admits that this isn’t a ‘great business model’, and that in reality, people do ‘tend to remember you and […] recommend you on’, but the fundamentals of this idea are important to the company. Nick, and consequently the rest of the Seventh-Wave® team, believes ‘in the goodness of people, and the potential of people, and they just need somebody to unlock it’. Seventh-Wave® isn’t there to be the reason for an individual’s growth: that person has had this potential in them all along. Rather, Seventh-Wave® is merely pushing these individuals in the right direction, allowing them to become the best they can be, and ensuring that, at all points, the experience is about the individual, and not the company. 

This focus is clear in the way they obtain clients. Nick tells me the story of Seventh-Wave’s® first client, which begins with a rather off-discouraging experience he had attempting to sell the product to strangers on LinkedIn. His first, and only, attempt at this ended in a gust of wind, pages of a Seventh-Wave® pamphlet all over the floor of Costa, and no sale. You can put the rest together yourself, I’m sure. After this, Nick vowed to never try this cold call sales technique again. Instead, he went through his network, called a former colleague called Rory, from London, and simply shared the idea with him. ‘It wasn’t meant to be a Trojan horse, but it kind of ended up being’, said Nick, who recounted how this method ended in Rory saying: ‘let’s start with us’. On the train home from that meeting, Nick told himself that ‘if I can share and sell it once, I can share and sell it twice. That means I can share and sell it 100 times’. From this realisation, the clients began flooding in, and they maintain this method even now. It’s not about selling, it’s about sharing the concept, and allowing the customer to decide if the product is right for them. Simple.

“It’s not about selling, it’s about sharing the concept, and allowing the customer to decide if the product is right for them.”

I end the interview by asking where Nick sees Seventh-Wave® in 5 years time: a big question, I know. He replies that he would love to have ‘100 accredited trainers as a part of our amazing network’, but also that ‘we’ve not changed that much, so our fundamental core offer is still the same’. Seventh-Wave® just wants every individual to ‘believe in yourself, believe in others, and believe in the programme’, and it is this principle that motivates Nick and his company. Sure, the measurable numbers of trainers to measure success are nice, but the immeasurable effects had on people’s lives through this training programme is much more valuable to Seventh-Wave®. 

It’s at this point that I close Zoom until the next inevitable quiz, unsure as to how long this will be my normal. That is a question no one knows the correct response to, but if you want to know if the core values of Seventh-Wave® have changed, I can give you a clear answer: no, and I doubt they ever will. The world has changed greatly over the past few months, and will probably change even more in the future, but one thing we can know for sure is that Seventh-Wave® will always have the improvement of others as their motivational core, as it has from its outset. And I guess we all have one man to thank for that: 

Rory, from London.

(I’m kidding, it’s Nick Booth).