Member showcase: The Rickter Company

The Rickter Company logo

Formed in 2001, The Rickter Company Ltd have specialised in providing motivational mentoring, soft skill assessment and evaluation tools to not-for-profit companies and public sector departments.

The Rickter Scale

Their signature product, the versatile Rickter Scale® enables individuals to set their own goals, develop an action plan and gives clear evidence of employee progress towards increasing confidence and inter-relational skills, clearly instilling in people a greater sense of choice, ownership and responsibility.

Complemented by their online Impact Management System, organisations can access individual or aggregated and analysed volume data from multiple worksites for the benefit of their clients, staff, management or stakeholders. Among the adaptations of the Rickter Scale® Process are those for Staff Appraisal, Employability, Well-being, Disability Support and Criminal Justice.

The company is run by a small core of staff, but delivers value through its network of freelance trainers and associates. They found Open to Export through their routine searches for export-related advice and practical guidance.

The Rickter Company’s exporting

The Rickter Company are currently doing business across Europe and are in the process of setting up new deals in North America. Although they started exporting their services overseas in Australia and New Zealand in the early 00s, they found greater success in Europe. They’ve had particular success recently in Bulgaria where 300 young people they worked with successfully made average progress of 82% towards their goals, with 57% achieving demonstrable positive hard outcomes.

They started selling in Europe by partnering in ESF projects including the Leonardo and Grundtvig Programmes. UKTI support also helped them to make inroads, especially in Ireland – their first European market.

However,they have definite reservations about a possible EU exit by the UK, because a lot of the projects they work with are funded by EU social funding. This reinforces our finding from our latest EU webinar that 47% of companies would be less likely to do trade with Europe in the case of a British EU exit.

Advice to exporters

In terms of advice to new exporters, their CEO Keith Stead said that you should prepare thoroughly before even beginning to invest in the process. He added that you should start selling overseas by optimizing your approach in one country, rather than selling in a scattergun way all over the world.

Sectors: Management Consultancy and Professional Services
Countries: Bulgaria, Eastern Europe, Europe, Scotland, United Kingdom, and Western Europe
Topics: Getting Started
Export Action Plan