As Dynamic Leadership Programs Australia (DLPA) moves into its 10th year, founder Karlie Cremin reflects on its successes and setbacks.
While working in a business consultancy, Cremin decided to start DLPA as she realised the true driver of business: people.
“In 2015, I kind of identified that the only real lever in a business that was making the real impact was the people,” she tells Azzet.
“If you got your people strategy right, the market would be much more forgiving of other things like pricing policy and so forth.”
The idea inspired her to develop a range of workshops and services for business owners, ranging from one-sessions to year-long programs.
A challenging industry
According to Future Management Insights, Australia is one of the top five leading countries in terms of revenue in the leadership development space.
Fortune Business Insights values the leadership training market in Australia at around US$1.4 million in 2024 and estimates that it will grow to around $2.9 million by 2032.
While DLPA is currently in a space where they are following this trend, growing 50% each year since COVID and eyeing 60% growth for 2025, Cremin said it was a “hyper-competitive” space to enter.
"There are a lot of single-person operators, so it is tricky to compete on a price basis with them,” she says.
Cremin also said how long sales cycles can continue was a real eye-opener for her as an everlasting obstacle when entering the industry.
“We had a sale recently where the first contact was six years ago, so the sales cycle can really go for quite a long time,” she says.
Cremin says articulating the return on investment is also a unique challenge for her business as they work with humans.
“A lot of businesses want to say, yes, if I put $1 into training, how much will I get? And the equation is just a little more complicated than that,” she says.
“If you get a bit too black and white when you're talking about humans, it can certainly come across as disrespectful, which is something we actively try to avoid.”
DLPA was also a business hit hard by COVID. Cremin said thanks to COVID they had entirely re-framed their strategy just when they hit their stride as a business and experienced “extreme growth”.
“We were kind of really coming into maturity as a business and overnight that was just gone,” she says.
“We ran a few pilots around trying to go online. We learned very quickly what not to do, and that there are certain things that we do that just can't be done virtually.”
“We pivoted to more of a consultancy base through that so we could do it remotely through COVID.”
While DLPA has now bounced back to where it was just before COVID, she said they entered a period of uncertainty when everything opened up.
“It was almost like a standing start, where there was a lot of wait and see on the market,” she says.
“There was a lot of hesitancy around spending money on certain things because we didn't know what was coming.”
Let the work speak for itself
Cremin says DLPA tries to stray from purely online advertising and lets clients see what the business does for themselves.
She said the most effective way for clients to see how they are different is to be in the room and experience it.
“In order to help people understand us, we offer to ‘try before you buy’, so that people can come into different settings and really experience what we do so that they can understand how we're different from others,” Cremin says.
Another way they stand out from the crowd is by focusing on sustainable behavioural change that she hopes can be implemented well after the sessions are complete.
This includes their flagship three-day residential dynamic leader and immersion programs, which Cremin says are popular and their psychosocial hazards training and development. This has given them the largest revenue share over the last calendar year.
Since COVID, Cremin said they have also become quite client-driven in whether they offer a 100% in-person course or a hybrid model.
The future of DLPA
Looking into the future of DLPA, Cremin says she sees large growth for the business, especially as they partner with Crestcom.
The negotiations with the U.S.-based global leadership development organisation took around 18 months and will allow them to bring their services to Australian and New Zealand shores.
In a Crestcom media release, Crestcom ANZ general manager Clint McCully said DLPA was the ideal partner due to its well-established programs.
“As businesses across Australia and New Zealand face calls to build more effective, diverse, and respectful workplace cultures, this exclusive partnership offers a seamless solution for organisations looking to develop their leaders across multiple locations,” McCully says.
As part of the program, DLPA will focus on the Crestcom L.E.A.D.R program designed for emerging leaders and middle managers.
Cremin says the partnership will help them reach new levels of growth. It will be especially helpful to connect with organisations with multiple sites across the globe in regions like Hong Kong, the U.K. and the U.S.
“Our partnership with Crestcom means we can now provide businesses with a proven, scalable leadership development solution that can be implemented consistently, no matter where their teams are based - be it in Australia, New Zealand, or across the globe,” she says.
