GC Business Growth Hub mentoring having positive impact on region’s SME businesses

Greater Manchester-based businesses are being given the chance to work with some of the region’s leading names in business, thanks to mentoring services provided by GC Business Growth Hub.

GC Business Growth Hub is highlighting the positive impact its mentoring programmes are having on businesses and is also inviting Greater Manchester SMEs to get in touch to find out more about the fully-funded services on offer. 

Dawn Duggan, People, Skills and Talent Lead at GC Business Growth Hub, said: “Having a mentor can make a huge difference to entrepreneurs, business owners and leaders. The most successful people surround themselves with those they learn from, so it’s no surprise that many of our aspirational clients ask for a mentor.

“Mentors can make a huge difference to a mentee through the insights they share from their own personal experience, helping them to navigate the everyday challenges faced when running a business. Everyone has their own individual challenges and no two people are the same. Therefore, we match mentors with a person rather than a business.”

On average GC Business Growth Hub match 10 new mentoring relationships each month, with mentors meeting with their mentees for between 10 to 20 hours for one-to-one mentoring sessions.

Over the last seven years, more than 800 mentoring relationships have been formed, with more than 8,000 hours of voluntary support provided by the 400 mentors GC Business Growth Hub is able to call upon.

The mentors are all volunteers are drawn from a wide cross section of businesses across the Greater Manchester area.

GC Business Growth Hub is part of The Growth Company, which is responsible for identifying SMEs which could benefit from Mentoring for Growth, a flagship programme run by Be the Business, which connects SMEs with big names in business.

Mentors available include senior figures from the UK's leading businesses including GSK, Amazon and The John Lewis Partnership.

Should an SME not qualify for the Be the Business programme it can still benefit from GC Business Growth Hub's own mentoring services, meaning a mentoring service is available to all small businesses.

Be the Business, which oversees Mentoring for Growth programme, is the business-led organisation created to drive up UK productivity and competitiveness.

Businesses looking to access specialist support can visit the GC Business Growth Hub web site for more information about the organisation’s extensive range of services. This and other GC Business Growth Hub projects are part-financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) as part of the GM Business Growth Hub project designed to help ambitious SME businesses achieve growth and increase employment in Greater Manchester.

The Hub is also supported by the Greater Manchester Combined Authority and Greater Manchester local authorities.

• www.businessgrowthhub.com