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.

Thank you for connecting me with David Smalley, he provided sound mentoring advice for my growing business and helped me to reconfirm my thinking and next steps.  I very much look forward to working with him over the coming months.

The mentoring session with Alan Aubrey was really helpful. Our mentor brought a huge amount of experience to the table and insightfully applied it to a range of challenges that we faced as a business in trying to scale the growth of the company. Several of his recommendations are already starting to have a profound impact on our business Tribosonics Ltd. Definitely one of the best benefits of our membership of Connect Yorkshire.

Rachel Kay was extremely supportive and we covered a wide variety of topics. I came away with lots of ideas, books to read and websites to review. I was made to feel very welcome and it was great to have a look round and meet the rest of the team. It’s given me lots to think about and work on going forward and I am hoping to go back for another visit soon.

I spent a couple of very enlightening hours with Judith Donovan. She certainly lived up to her reputation and we explored a number of areas of the business and discussed approaches and ideas that will definitely improve how I run Quba.

The meeting with Rachel was excellent. It was really beneficial for us to hear Rachel’s objective thoughts on the Fresh Thinking proposition and the direction we are looking to take the business in. We came away with a lot of valuable thoughts and ideas from Rachel which I’m sure will help us in the months to come. So all in all, time very well spent and we are extremely grateful to Rachel for giving us 3 hours of her time, which I’m sure is in quite short supply!

I had my 1 to 1 mentoring session with Jonathan Straight in April 2018.The session was a great success. The session was filled with lots of knowledge and advice from Jonathan, which was all really useful and helpful. We spoke about a variety of business issues and also about The Crescents new premises and Jonathan’s photography work (which is super cool). Jonathan also offered to be a sounding board for me in the future which I will definitely take up. A massive thanks to Jonathan and the CY team.