Background

The Help to Grow: Management programme at Nottingham Business School came at the right time for Liam. With 20 years’ experience in a corporate environment, the transition to founder-director of Trent Safety was one that he sometimes found overwhelming. The course appealed to Liam because of his need to deliver maximum impact in a short space of time along with the flexible online/offline format which was able to fit perfectly into his busy schedule.

Impact

In his passion to develop Trent Safety in the mould he envisaged – Liam recognised that a number of issues he was encountering with the business laid with himself. As Liam reflects: ‘a lot of the issues the business was encountering was this bottleneck I was creating and that’s essentially why I ended up coming through to Nottingham Business school and starting the process of the Help to Grow.’

Just as Liam has hoped, each session of Help to Grow is delivered by an expert on the topic which has opened his eyes to new models and different ways of working. Liam found that ‘actually speaking with somebody who's sort of been there, done that, and an expert the field is great.’

The session on organisational design, delivered by a HR specialist, helped Liam meet his pre-course aim of removing himself as a ‘bottleneck’ for the business and implementing the right systems and processes. Liam says: ‘I'm involved in my team more than ever now and this was something that that came as a as a result of the course.’ For example, Liam has implemented monthly team meetings combined with a ‘problem clinic’ whereby he encourages his team to communicate problems and repackage those as an opportunity for process improvement.

Trent Services have already benefited from the implementation of new ideas and processes, with more results to come long-term through the business’s bespoke growth plan. Liam has started working on the growth plan explaining that ‘where I was previously writing a bit of a Bible and a business plan for the business, well, I'm not now, I'm writing a growth plan.’ Liam reveals that ‘growth is what the course really delivers and hits upon.’

Since Liam completed the Help to Grow: Management Course, he has been able to take the learning from the workshops and explore it further through his mentoring and peer group review. His mentor Ben Wilson has enabled Liam to mould what he has learnt on the programme and then transfer these skills to his role at Trent Safety. Liam feels that he was very well matched up with his mentor: ‘working with Ben is absolutely brilliant, Ben allows me to verbalise and talk about my business, my vision and my direction, but adds little gems in there to say have you looked at that or have you considered this and that’s what I really liked.’