Warwickshire County Cricket Club

In the words of Stuart Cain, CEO: “Over the past year, EPP has advised on Warwickshire CCC’s high-performance strategy as we wrestled with an under-performing men’s team and the formation of our first professional women’s team.”

Based on our strategy and an understanding of the Bears’ culture, they helped us understand exactly what we wanted from the Women’s Head Coach and successfully led the recruitment process, leading to the identification and appointment of a world-class coach.

They then led a review of the men’s red and white ball high-performance environment, working with the Board and Cricket Audit Committee, identifying a number of practical areas for improvement as well as more nuanced cultural issues for us to address. We probably wouldn’t have spotted these without their expertise and involvement.

This led to them helping us with our strategic understanding of the role, characteristics and interactions of a Performance Director and Head Coach, as well as a new leadership structure. At this point, due to their deep understanding of our strategy, culture and performance objectives, we appointed EPP to define the Performance Director role and lead the recruitment, again identifying a field of high-calibre candidates that led to an exceptional appointment from outside of cricket.

By challenging our thinking, it led to an exciting outcome and the identification of candidates that I think we would have missed if leading the search ourselves.

This wasn’t the easiest of assignments for EPP as there were a number of challenges along the way, but they were always patient, understanding and responsive to changing dynamics, but continued to challenge and tell us if they felt we were going in the wrong direction.

“Personally, I learnt a lot from them about strategic high-performance thinking during the review process – I found their knowledgeable, pragmatic and experience-based approach really helpful and they offered the right amount of navigation and counsel, quietly steering us without ever arrogantly trying to tell us the answer. It also helped immensely that they were just ‘good people’ that I could easily talk to”.