Helping Owners Build Businesses Capable of Growing

For around 15 years, Stuart Maddocks has worked extensively with SME owners, founders and leadership teams through Clemorton and a range of business growth programmes.

That experience has included supporting hundreds of SME owners, working with high-growth businesses and contributing to programmes including Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses and UK Government-backed growth initiatives.

The things that help create a successful small business are not always the things that allow it to scale.

As a business grows, the owner can become the point through which too many decisions, customer relationships and operational issues pass.

Sales may need to become more systematic. Managers need to take greater responsibility. Priorities become harder to maintain. Roles need greater clarity and the organisation has to develop capability beyond the founder.

Growth can therefore expose weaknesses that were manageable when the organisation was smaller.

Our SME work looks at the business as a whole.

Depending on the challenge, that can include growth strategy, commercial performance, sales, customers, leadership, management capability, organisational structure, people and execution.

The starting point is not a predetermined programme.

We work with owners and leadership teams to understand what is restricting growth and where intervention is most likely to make a difference.

The aim is to help the business become less dependent on individual effort and more capable of delivering consistently as it grows.

That can mean stronger leadership, clearer commercial priorities, better management, greater accountability or simply helping the owner step back far enough to see what the business needs next.

Growth is rarely just a sales problem.

A business can generate more demand and still become harder to run.

Sustainable growth requires the commercial side of the business and the organisation behind it to develop together.