Having access to a business mentor with Connect Yorkshire is a real benefit. My first meeting with David Smalley this week has given me so much food for thought. Hearing David’s experiences in his business and relating that to our challenges has turned my thinking on its head. We are now developing a plan to grow our business free of the barriers and constraints of the traditional agency model. His time was really valuable to us and watch out for our blog, but we promise that scheduled fun is a thing of the past!

The meeting was fantastic. Paul Rose was extremely helpful. We discussed many issues surround my business. Paul was both happy to listen but free and thorough with his advice. He clearly is a very knowledgeable business man and although my business was smaller than he is used to dealing with, he was thoughtful and understanding with his advice. I would highly recommend Paul to anyone, regardless of size or nature of business, as an excellent mentor.

My afternoon with Kevin Walsh was invaluable. Kevin is currently Chairman of Manx Telecom, and his all-round experience enabled us to have discussions that lead directly to new ideas and effective outcomes that had not been previously considered. Some of these ideas we are now already implementing into both short and long term strategies which I believe will impact positively on the growth and culture of our business and build upon the fantastic service that we already deliver to our customers.

We were extremely grateful to Connect Yorkshire for facilitating this, and to Kevin for his dedicating his time to us

We are currently going through the process of trying to understand our most valuable customer types. Julian  impressed me at a recent event with his very concise way of linking his companies brand values to their customer acquisition and marketing strategy.

I found him to be a good sounding board for the issues we were having in identifying people who cared enough about our necessary but largely uninteresting products. He helped me come to a conclusion as to who we should be targeting and provided some useful contacts to assist with the process.

Really useful session with Michael Bridge. While I was expecting to discuss one very specific aspect of the business, we ended up working on the five year plan sparking some great ideas for investment and growth. Invaluable.

Mike Bridge brings a unique perspective, based on years of selling value at the highest levels of business. As a service provider, we not only need to establish the needs of our customer and deliver results, it’s critical our customers recognise and value our efforts and results over a long term relationship.

Mike has  developed techniques that have helped ensure we can maximise the win for both us and our clients in any scenario.

It was good to have the opportunity for some quality and relaxed time with Hugh, we also had time to walk around each plant and discuss the Gripple model of “Employee Share Ownership”.

Hugh is clearly a passionate and a staunch “Manufacture in the UK” advocate, the same as our Chairman Richard Hobbs. We are a Wakefield Manufacturer and always intend to remain so but we also want to penetrate the European Market, we wanted the opportunity to discuss our strategy and seek Hugh’s valued views. It was encouraging to us that Hugh had experienced difficulty penetrating the German Market and he reinforced our belief that we had a good understanding of the challenges we face and that we had done our research to have a plan of how to react to those challenges.

Its early days for us but a valuable and enjoyable half day with Hugh and we came away with a lot of thoughts on how to proceed with our exciting strategy.

Thank you for organising Libby and my thanks to Hugh for his time.

Mike Bridge approached me at a recent Connect Yorkshire event and asked if he could provide a springboard session for our sales team; which I more than welcomed.

Obviously his previous experience carries a bit of weight and the presentation he carried out definitely hit home with our sales team.

We have subsequently changed our sales focus to think more about our “value proposition”, as positioned by Mike and we will be discussing this in future sales meetings and putting into practice in our day to day interactions with customers. I’ll let you know the outcomes of this as we move forward.

Many thanks to Mike and the team at Connect Yorkshire for allowing us his time and experience. I’d definitely recommend this to other members.

My session with Mike Bridge was an absolute game-changer for my new business, he helped me to focus on the necessary steps that will make the biggest difference from where I am right now to where I want to be in order to reach my revenue goals for the next two years. He was open, approachable, knowledgeable and kindly distilled his years of experience to assist. He left me with actionable things to implement and I look forward to having another session in the future.

One session with Rachel Hannan was like rocket fuel for my business! Together we came up with some great solutions for issues I’d be wrestling with for some time. It has really helped me maximise my growth plans and has already made significant future growth more of a reality.