How the Help to Grow: Management Course completely transformed our marketing

At Huddersfield Business School, we have a diverse array of programmes available; all designed to enhance business growth and develop the skills of individuals within the organisation.

Tailored to cater to the needs of business leaders of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), our Help to Grow: Management programme is ideal for those aiming to elevate their business growth, strengthen resilience, and ensure sustained advancement.

The comprehensive 12-week programme delves into a spectrum of modules including strategy and innovation, building a brand, efficient operations, winning new markets and internationalisation, and much more.

In this blog, we speak to Help to Grow alumni Peter Beaumont, associate director of Monty Miracle. Peter successfully completed the programme in December 2022 and has since seen a remarkable surge in growth, amounting to an impressive 362%.

Why did you choose to take part in the Help to Grow programme?

It was put forward by my mentor Don McCombe – whom we met through the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB). He was great at giving us golden nuggets of information about how we could grow our business and Help to Grow was one of them!

We'd been working with Don for six or eight weeks previous to him mentioning the Help to Grow programme. He said that I would be the prime candidate for the programme as I wanted to learn and grow.

He said that Help to Grow would be perfect for me to expand what I know already and put Monty Miracle in a better position business-wise. It was an opportunity not to be missed!

Out of the 12 modules, which one do you think was the most beneficial for you and the business?

I would say the marketing module as it helped us a lot more than I thought it would. Since completing the Help to Grow programme, that's what we've been concentrating on, and we've seen a huge uplift in growth off the back of this.

The marketing module showed me a different way to approach things marketing-wise. For example, social media – it's a visual medium that is perfect for our products. People need to see our product in action to see how good it is.

The reaction we've had to our video content has been dramatic. We've seen a 362% increase in growth internally already this year, which definitely has something to do with the digital marketing piece we've been working on off the back of the Help to Grow programme.

We've had over 120,000 new followers on TikTok in around three months! This is a platform we had but didn't really do much with until we learned more about how effective this could be.

After completing the Help to Grow programme, we decided to get a TikTok shop as we thought it would be silly not to take advantage of this – we were getting around 200/300 messages a day.

We are now making plans for our other social media platforms to ensure we are utilising them to their best capacity. Social media is so powerful for us as a company.

We've also been working on our content and making sure every little bit of information we provide our customers, whether that be on the website, social media etc., is correct and consistent.

This has meant that we've also had to make sure that everybody internally who works for Monty Miracle fully understands how the business works, how we want to work, and how the products work to ensure that they can portray our mission, vision, and values to our customers.

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Considering your learnings from the programme, how have you taken these and improved processes or ways of working in the business?

We are working on our marketing strategy and looking at ways in which we can maximise our social media channels – more than we did before completing the Help to Grow programme.

Since February, we've seen a 362% increase in growth, which I'd say about 50% of that was from social media. I've also done a lot of work on the website.

I've created a lot of content, repurposed some content, added a few new landing pages for products and done some research on keywords to make sure that we are ranking as high as possible on Google. I've managed to rank on the first page for some of our product landing pages!

The Help to Grow programme has 100% made us think more about our digital marketing and improved the ways we work in that area.

Can you talk through some of the areas in your company that have improved since implementing new processes/ways of working?

We are looking at recruiting new staff – a head of social media and a few roles in digital marketing. We've already recruited a head of sales to develop and nurture leads. This role has made it possible for us to make moves into football clubs.

We have also outsourced our PR and was recently named one of the 2023 SME UK Enterprise Award Winners!

Not only has the Help to Grow programme allowed us to grow our sales and expand our business, but it has also allowed us to grow our mindset.

It's opened our minds to different things and different thoughts and different areas and how to plan things. It's allowed us to think about what our long-term goals are and where we want to be in the next five years.

What would you say to business leaders who are thinking of joining the programme but are worried they don't have enough time?

I know time can be quite tight, but if you don't focus on yourself and growth it's going to be very difficult to get anywhere.

I learned that through Help to Grow – you've got to make time to put work into your business, make time for yourself and make time to network. Networking is crucial – you could not only help your business, but you could be helping other businesses too.

The most valuable thing I got from the programme was sitting in a room with everyone and having conversations. People asking questions and learning from their thought processes and hearing from people talking about their businesses in general and just chatting – it's really powerful.

Want to help a small business grow?

Being a mentor goes far beyond the rewarding feeling of 'giving back'. Mentors gain a range of personal development benefits from the experience.

Become a voluntary mentor for the Help to Grow: Management Course and commit 10 hours over 12 weeks to support businesses with their growth action plan. Sign up today