Mentor kick off!

Well – my mentoring kicked off today with Karen - she’s been great at keeping in touch by email since the official announcement. We had a really enjoyable lunch at L’Atelier Joel Robuchon – as you’d expect Karen knows where the best Top Table offers are and we had a tasty lunch at a very reasonable price!

5 years in 2 hours!
I’ve updated Karen on Intelligent Marketing, how we set up, what our plans are for the next 5 years or so, and talked through my role in relation to the other directors in the business. It feels like there’s loads to tell her – how can I summarise the highs and lows of our first 5 years in business, all the initiatives we’re proud of, what’s gone less well, the people I work with, my plans for the future, and my current concerns… all in a couple of hours?! That said, I was impressed at how much Karen knew about us and how thoroughly she’d checked out our website!

Anyway, we’ve covered loads of good stuff, including:
* Leadership
* Running a growing business
* Managing people (particularly senior members of the team)
* Maintaining a strong culture
* The roles of CEO vs MD…

which was incredibly stimulating and provided lots of food for thought for me. I now need to distill our conversation into the Fresh Ideas 3 month and 6 month objectives for the competition!

Next steps?

A day shadowing Karen, going to her offices, attending some of their meetings, getting to know her team and her business better.

Karen’s also very kindly agreed to make a presentation at one of Intelligent Marketing’s client Masterclasses which will be fantastic. I’m keen to make sure that the rest of IM knows what a great ‘prize’ I’ve won, and to demonstrate the benefits of it as overtly and publicly as possible. It was also a real pleasure to hear Karen say that she hoped to learn lots from the way we’ve done things too.

Our businesses are not dissimilar, and there may well be opportunities for sharing our experiences both ways.