Charles Barnard is a business coach, interim executive, and professional speaker who helps business owners and leadership teams build organisations that are commercially strong, well led, and built to last.
He is the founder of GrowthForge, a practical transformation system designed around one central principle: sustainable growth only occurs when Cash, Culture, and Clarity are addressed together. When any one of these is ignored, businesses become fragile — often without realising it until pressure exposes the weakness.
With a background in industrial engineering, an MBA, and a Master of Business Coaching, Charles brings a disciplined, systems-based approach to business improvement. His career spans senior leadership roles, turnaround assignments, and advisory work across manufacturing, construction, industrial services, and professional services environments.
Charles specialises in helping organisations move from complexity and fragmentation to control and coherence. His work typically focuses on:
Known for his pragmatic, no-nonsense style, Charles avoids management fads and one-size-fits-all frameworks. He challenges rigid, top-down approaches while maintaining strong respect for governance, structure, and clearly defined authority.
His focus is on building systems that perform reliably under pressure, rather than relying on individual heroics.
In his coaching and facilitation, Charles often uses structured simulations and hands-on exercises to help leadership teams see how behaviour, process, and financial outcomes interact in real time. This approach allows difficult conversations to occur without blame or defensiveness, enabling teams to focus on improvement rather than fault-finding.
Charles is also the author of Forged: A Family, a Fabricator, a Fight for the Future, a business fable that explores leadership, culture, and commercial decision-making within a family-owned manufacturing business.
At the core of Charles’s work is a commitment to balance. He believes that performance without humanity leads to burnout and brittleness, while empathy without accountability leads to drift. His role is to help leaders hold both — making clear, well-reasoned decisions that stand up over time.
Charles works primarily with privately owned businesses, family enterprises, and leadership teams who want clearer thinking, stronger execution, and sustainable growth without losing what makes their business human.
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