Harry

Name
Harry

Position
Board Advisor

Location
Hampshire

Big Business Experience

Orange

GE

Small Business Experience

Casewise

ProReal

Summary

Entrepreneurial business leader and SME advisor and mentor. Experienced in supporting early-stage and growing company leadership teams to plan and execute effectively to achieve success.

Good at diagnosing performance issues and building organisational capability. Focused on growing revenue, profit and value.

Specialist in leadership, business planning, investor preparedness, strategic clarity, value proposition development, effective marketing and sales, service development, customer experience and avoiding mistakes that impact the bottom-line.

Sector experience includes technology (SaaS, telematics, e-commerce, virtual reality, mobile telecoms, EDI) and business services (online recruitment, consulting and outsourced development).

Qualifications

  • BA in Business Studies (University of Dundee)
  • Diploma in Digital Marketing (IDM)
  • Diploma in Advanced Business Advisory Skills (Business West)
  • Accredited Business Consultant (IBA)
  • Interim of The Year runner-up (Wessex 100)

Key Areas of Expertise

  • Leadership – the essentials
  • Business models
  • Business planning (the modern way) and reality checking
  • Risk assessment
  • Being ready for investor conversations
  • Strategic clarity
  • Value proposition development (and associated messaging)
  • Effective sales & marketing
  • Service development & design
  • Customer experience
  • Building relationships
  • Avoiding expensive mistakes

Experience

Significant experience of providing pragmatic support (leadership, investor management, funding, pipeline development, project leadership, marketing and CEO mentoring) to start-up and scale-up SMEs across a range of industries. Track record of 20 satisfied clients, some of whom have remained friends.

Built 3 businesses, the first one was based on spotting a market space for a major technology business to address and then building an internal business case to take it to market. A proper ‘intrapreneurial’ project. Result – $6.5m new business revenue in 2 years. The next one, an e-commerce consulting and engineering business, grew fast and acquired several major customers – we exited that after 3 years. The third was on the cusp of success and then my business partner decided it wasn’t working for him and abandoned it (and me). Interesting lessons to be learned from that experience.

Alongside Boardroom Advisors, just about to start another business and also help a US company break into the UK market.