Background

The beginnings of Coloured Square Ltd go back to 1998 when Mark Dando was responsible for an internal development programme at Somerfield Stores and Doug Richardson was responsible for designing and delivering it, on behalf of the organisation he was working for at the time.  Effectively, Mark was Doug’s client….

The two of us have worked hand in glove since then and we have a hugely productive & strong relationship. This obviously now extends to the wider Coloured Square team. However, it wasn’t always so! At the start, we were forced by circumstance to work together, something which was often challenging for us both. Whilst we later discovered we shared a number of core values, we were – and remain – fundamentally different people. This of course, has been the source of our success together.

After about 6 months, when we began to understand the motivations and sense of purpose we each had, we began designing and delivering new materials and approaches that neither of us had seen or experienced anywhere else. We read feverishly to fuel our creativity. That group of delegates were our test-bed for a raft of new ideas, and very soon, we realised we were onto something that quickly and profoundly created change in our delegates! The defining moment for us was when one day, in late 1999, two of the people we were training came to us and said ‘when you two start your own business, we want to invest in you.’  And within about six months, we were out on our own, operating as Dando-Richardson, later morphing into Coloured Square…

As the business developed over the next few years, we started looking out for a limited number of quality trainers and coaches who would fit with our own values, and help us broaden our reach. This led us to start working with Alison Rogers, Andrew Manuel, Luke Thomas, all of whom had been trained by us, loved our material and how it benefited them personally, and were also NLP Practitioners.