Poul Sejer Nielsen Service A/S: leadership development, executive coaching and customer loyalty as a management tool

The challenge

In the service industry both customer satisfaction and earnings are decided out on the job — by the individual service manager and their team. For the company to grow, the management layer needs more than a working roster: it needs to lead itself, lead its team, communicate clearly and understand what the customer actually experiences as value.

At the same time the owner-management needed space to work on direction, priorities and its own leadership behaviour — and a tool that could turn customer loyalty into something you steer by rather than something you guess at.

The assignment

• Team days and team building for employees and managers.
• 1:1 executive business coaching with the CEO, 2024–2025.
• An intensive, modular, hands-on leadership programme for eight service managers in 2025, run over six months.
• An in-depth customer loyalty study among 20 PSN customers in early 2025, linked to financial profitability.

The leadership programme for the service managers

The programme was built as four modules across six months, leaving time to try new behaviour in daily operations in between. It opened with a kick-off and a 45-minute individual interview with every participant, and closed with a practical examination after the summer break, where the managers demonstrated what they had learned on their own real assignments.

• Kick-off, individual interviews and a JTI questionnaire before the first module.
• M1 (April): personal leadership and team development — JTI and the Z model, leading yourself, the change wheel, the behaviour triangle, success analysis, shared outdoor cooking and a morning run.
• M2 (May): leadership in practice — the responsibilities and obligations of the leadership role, practical exercises in leading teams, the SILK and ROSE models, communication in theory and practice, and peer feedback. The module was partly split between new and experienced service managers.
• M3 (June): customer value and service — the concept of value, deep dive methodology, visits from the company's own customers, the EFU and BALA tools, and case presentations in buddy pairs.
• M4 (after the summer break): examination on a real-life assignment, follow-up and evaluation.
• Between modules: a buddy system, written assignments, 45 minutes of 1:1 coaching and 45 minutes of sparring in buddy pairs.
• M1 and M2 were run as residential modules at Danhostel Hillerød, with work both indoors and outdoors.

Executive coaching with the CEO

In parallel, 1:1 executive business coaching was delivered with the CEO in 2024–2025. The coaching worked on the company's own live decisions: direction, priorities, leading the leaders, and how strategy was translated into something the service managers could act on.

It is that combination — top management and the management layer in the same effort — that keeps a leadership programme from becoming a side project and makes it the way the company is run.

The customer loyalty study: from measurement to daily management instrument

In early 2025 we carried out an in-depth customer loyalty study among 20 of PSN's customers. The study is our own concept development and differs from an ordinary satisfaction survey by linking loyalty to the financial profitability of each customer.

The result is used in two places at once: as a strategic steering tool for management when prioritising between customers, services and initiatives — and as a daily operational management instrument for middle managers, who can see what their own customers weight most and act on it in next week's operations.

Results and caveats

PSN Service has seen positive growth in its annual profit over the period 2023–2025 according to the company's publicly available financial statements (company reg. no. 29690073). The development supports the picture of a company working systematically on leadership, teams and customer value in the same period.

We do not attribute that growth to our programmes. An annual result is created by the market, the company's own decisions and the work of its employees — the development activities are one of several factors, and we have not carried out an independent impact measurement.