Bringing a business to the next level: Your Business Minder
Jeanine Hind is Managing Director of Your Business Minder. This successful company, based in New South Wales, Australia, offers interim management and management advisory services. When managers of SMEs need a break, Jeanine and her team step in. If they need a business plan, Jeanine walks them through it. She is also a master of tender writing. Over the years, she’s helped business leaders in a variety of sectors from secure document management to financial services to pest control.
After a decade or more of developing Your Business Minder, Jeanine recognised that scaling the business would be difficult. As I observed when we first spoke about the idea: “there is only one Jeanine.” And this is a key issue for many small firms when it comes to scaling: there is only one founder. The answer, usually, is to develop a franchising or licensing arrangement. That said, such arrangements are notoriously difficult to ‘get right’ and to control. We worked through the idea informally for a while. Then to put a bit of structure around the work, Jeanine joined my formal mentoring programme.
We spent about six months working through ideas, revising and working on her leadership and business knowledge and skills. We looked at strategic and critical thinking, change management, business modelling and strategic planning. Jeanine then focused in on her challenge: developing a scalable business model for Your Business Minder.
Over a further six months, Jeanine interviewed franchise and licensing experts, founders, franchisors, franchisees, licensors, licensees, and dug in to the professional and (limited) academic media on the subject. What she found aligns with the transformation of several business sectors. For Your Business Minder, the route to scale is not franchising or licensing. Instead, Jeanine sees the future of Interim Management as an online multi-sided marketplace, where Your Business Minder introduces interim managers to clients.
Jeanine’s experiences illustrate the approach I take with mentoring clients. I’ve spent several decades working in and leading business schools across the world. In that time, I've walked alongside and supported business leaders tackling a range of challenges (e.g., responding to customer needs, better managing, supply chains, keeping up with the market). While some of them were dealing with wicked problems, many more were struggling with the perennial challenge of where next, having enjoyed success.
We take a three-step approach over 12 months in which, working together with clients, we:
Assess their business's present position
Evaluate their business model.
Equip them to increase customer value, optimise costs and improve their business's building blocks.
If you have a successful business, but want to take it to the next level, drop me a line and we’ll set up a call: clive@clivesmallman.com