Hi, I'm Claire MacDonald. I'm one of the co-directors of MacMartin — we're a full service marketing agency in Derbyshire.
We've grown quite considerably over the last 12 months; we've doubled in terms of the number of staff, so we just wanted a bit of guidance. We've come up against things that, you know, we've not got much experience of, in terms of growing a team and a business so we wanted a little bit of support with that.
I think it's been really nice to take that step away out of the business and to really sit back and look in on the business. I think day to day I'm so, I've got my head down and I'm so involved in everything that's going on. I think this programme has given me
the opportunity to step back and really evaluate things. It gives you, yeah, a different perspective on it, so they come at things from a different way; they think about things in a different way and to then apply that to your business, often you come away with things that you probably wouldn't have thought of.
I've found it really useful to meet people from different backgrounds and different businesses. There's a real good mixture of sort of b2b, b2c businesses and it's been really nice to hear their point of view of some of like our pinch points and things that we're struggling with. And I think there's people that I'll keep in touch with as well after the programme.
I would recommend the programme to other people. I think it's a really good opportunity like I say to step away from your business to get other perspectives on things and just to go through some of the things that may, sort of, as we've learned about them, maybe something that actually, yeah, I was aware of but I've never actually taken the time to implement it in my business. So, I'd really recommend it from that point of view and the people that you meet, again just having those contacts, having
somebody else give their opinion and their advice on your business is really valuable.