The ScaleUp North East programme was created to provide ambitious business owners and entrepreneurs throughout the region with the opportunity to work alongside highly-experienced peers, our ScaleUp partners, who have all generated rapid growth within their own businesses and boast their own individual skillsets.
Together they bring invaluable networks in addition to expertise and connections that allow driven and motivated businesses realise and reach their scaling potential.
Throughout the last three years, Scaleup North East has had the privilege of working with some of the most creative and innovative entrepreneurs in the region.
These growing businesses are the pillars of our business community and will help us to overcome the effects of the current Covid-19 pandemic and lead the way for the next generation and for these reasons, we are committed to their success.
The work will continue within the North East business community as a new Scaleup programme comes in 2021.
Scaleup partner Angelina Bell sets targets together with her clients and reviews performance to enable financial control that eases cash flow and increases profitability, giving her clients the confidence and focus to get things done. Increasing productivity around personal KPIs, leadership and job matrices is the key.
Mindset and work-life balance are natural areas of progression that ultimately result in a better quality of life for the owner and senior team.
Craig Huntingdon, another ScaleUp partner, has been directly and indirectly involved with many great achievements, one business Craig positioned appropriately to win a huge contract 20x their turnover. Some of Craig’s clients he has prepared for BBC’s Dragons’ Den and then supported these businesses with navigating their business post the show.
After making introductions to a large international distributor he has assisted a client in winning a contract worth £500,000, while also supporting several manufacturers and brands to engage and win listings with major UK supermarkets.
After scaling and selling his own manufacturing business in 2015, Tony Brooks recognised he had a great deal more to do in life and was and remains to be, an immensely passionate Scale Up Partner who is dedicated to giving back to the North East economy.
One company after structural advice from Tony went on to increase in size and turnover in three years. He also supported the same company with significant R&D tax credit.
For another company, only 18 months old, Tony helped develop their 10-year strategic plan, made several introductions for them and one being to a 30-year-old company in the same field looking to exit. His client subsequently acquired this business, with a team of experts Tony put together, and the net result has been that they have achieved their 10-year vision in one year.
During the pandemic, Tony supported one company in making a sharp shift, pivoting them into a situation where they are now making record sales on QVC and they remain with Tony for expansion and strategic growth support.
There are those in this region that really graft to make that all important difference, and this is something Jon Symonds – one of our other Scale Up partners – deeply admires and relishes in supporting.
Jon worked with a client to facilitate and structure a buyout of their partner, assist with access into new territories in the UK by financially modelling a strategic and commercial model to replicate what is working in the North that will bring in an additional £500,000 a year, increased margin and head count.
Jon supported a client in expanding their waste management business by creating a strategy to enter into other sectors and thereby increase their turnover, profit and head count whilst spreading the risk of volatile rates in the markets they operate in resulting in a c25% increase in revenue year on year.
Whilst mentoring a client who had affected an MBO into a leadership CEO role, he helped them develop a strategy for growth, moved them to diverse to other opportunities such as supplying and distributing of equipment – which will now see a three-fold increase in revenue and increased margin Jon has supported one young entrepreneur in doubling his warehouse capacity and increasing revenues by 50% year on year as well as increasing his staffing levels and profitability.
As a team, these are four highly-experienced, professional and dedicated entrepreneurs who share their drive, ambition and hunger to succeed; to inspire, motive and propel the business community of the North-East, to realise their full potential and achieve their growth and scaling ambitions.
RTC North is delivering Scaleup North East in conjunction with the North East Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP).
The programme is part-funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). It is aimed at supporting North Eastbased businesses that can demonstrate both the hunger and the potential to achieve high levels of growth.
• Pictured above: The ScaleUp partners: Angelina Bell (top left), Craig Huntingdon (top right), Jon Symonds (bottom left) and Tony Brooks.
