Executive education

Help to Grow: Management

This government-subsidised, 12 week course is aimed at senior leaders of small and medium sized businesses who want their organisation to reach its full potential.

Course details

  • Start date: 9 October 2024
  • Duration: 50 hours of training over 12 weeks
  • Fee: £750 (The 12-week programme is 90% subsidised by the government, so costing only £750)
  • Study mode: blend of online and face-to-face sessions
  • Location: B175, Boldrewood Innovation Campus

About this course

This government-backed course is delivered in collaboration with industry experts and experienced entrepreneurs. Southampton Business School is Small Business Charter accredited.

The course provides access to learning, mentoring and resilience strategies. We'll give you the tools you need to grow your business, fast.

As part of this course you will:

  • receive 1 to 1 support from a mentor
  • create a bespoke growth plan to help your business reach its full potential
  • learn from peers and network with businesses just like yours
  • become part of the alumni network of like-minded business professionals
  • build a relationship with a QS ranked global top 100 University for future collaboration

Who this course is for

The course is for business owners, leaders, or senior managers from all business sectors. Charities are not eligible. 

To be eligible, you and your business must:

  • be a small or medium sized enterprise (SME) based in the UK that has been operational for at least one year
  • employ between 5 and 249 employees (SMEs with more than 10 employees can send 2 delegates)
  • be a member of the senior leadership team and have direct reports

Learning and assessment

To get the most out of the course, you must be a senior decision maker. You must also commit to attending all the scheduled learning sessions for the 12 modules.

If you complete all 12 modules you'll receive a certificate of completion.

The course gives you an opportunity to learn alongside like-minded business owners. It is delivered with a mix of scheduled online and face-to-face daytime sessions, enabling flexibility alongside your commitments.

As well as 50 hours of in-depth training you'll receive 10 hours of 1 to 1 support from a mentor.

Course modules

The course is divided into 4 parts:

  • Part 1: Strategies for growth and innovation: focuses on what your business does and how you want it to develop in the future
  • Part 2: Engaging with customers: focuses on why you do what you do, how you connect with your customers and how you effectively convey your values and purpose in your brand
  • Part 3: Building a sustainable and agile business: focuses on creating a suitable organisational structure to deliver your goals, and adopting good practice in the leadership and management of teams
  • Part 4: Operations and financial strategies: focuses on what happens in the business to create outputs, how you monitor progress and use information to inform decision-making

Learning outcomes include:

  1. Understanding innovation  and its relationship to growth,  profitability, and productivity.
  2. Reviewing your business model and value proposition in relation to current and future market opportunities.
  3. Understanding how business model innovation can help you respond to and recover from challenges.
  4. Finding out about the UK’s innovation ecosystem. 

Learning outcomes include:

  1. Understanding the benefits of digital adoption for SMEs in innovating business models and seizing opportunities.
  2. Considering what stage your business has reached on the path to digital adoption from digitisation to digital transformation and identifying priority development areas.
  3. Understanding the role of digital leadership and considering digital enablers to achieve a transformational culture.
  4. Being alert to the risks of a digitised environment and ways to mitigate that risk.

Learning outcomes include: 

Taking an in-depth look at how a business has:

  • innovated its model
  • developed markets overseas
  • explored models to address opportunities in different countries
  • adapted their business model and overcame challenges
  • how the experience encouraged them to innovate

Learning outcomes include: 

  1. Understanding the strategic value of vision, purpose and brand, their link to the customer value proposition and role in achieving competitive advantage.
  2. Exploring vision, mission and values statements and planning an approach for reviewing these in your business.
  3. Defining brand components and how they add value to your business and customers.
  4. Understanding the role of your business’s vision, values and brand in organisational culture and employee engagement.

Learning outcomes include:

  1. Further developing your customer value proposition and your business’s approach to marketing.
  2. Understanding market segmentation, targeting and positioning (STP) within your business’s competitive environment.
  3. Considering the stages in the buyer decision-making processes.
  4. Starting to consider the benefits of database marketing.

Learning outcomes include:

  1. Exploring how a business built a market-leading brand and continued to serve its customers’ needs through changing times.
  2. What challenges had to be overcome and how did the company stay true to its purpose and values.

Learning outcomes include:

  1. Identifying growth phases and when and how it will be necessary to evolve the shape of the organisation to implement growth.
  2. Considering SME examples of different structures and ways of working and the implications for your workforce.
  3. Jointly with others in your business, reviewing skills, roles, and training to ensure the required expertise is available to deliver the growth plan. 4. Considering structures and processes to facilitate agile working.

Learning outcomes include:

  1. Identifying appropriate strategies for leading change in an inclusive and engaging way.
  2. Planning to implement approaches that enhance employee engagement.
  3. Recognising the impact of your own leadership approach as a key enabler for growth.
  4. Being able to utilise tools and resources collaboratively to lead your team towards strategic goals.

Learning outcomes include:

Exploring an example of a company that has put employee engagement at the heart of their business and created an inclusive culture. The tools and ways of working are innovative and productive, and the business has achieved growth through the way it works as much as through what it does.

Learning outcomes include: 

  1. Understanding the role of operations and how to take a systemic approach, aligning operations with marketing strategy. 
  2. Analysing operations using a value flow map.
  3. Considering an approach to key metrics which engages teams and creates a culture of continuous improvement in value flow. 
  4. Recognising how your operations improvement strategy contributes towards your Growth Action Plan.

Learning outcomes include:

  1. Using financial data to make informed decisions about future operations including identifying relevant financial metrics for monitoring growth and productivity.
  2. Understanding the importance of cash flow forecasting in managing crisis and recovery.
  3. Considering options for financing growth both internally and from external sources and being aware of where to source information and advice.

Learning outcomes include:

  1. Developing priorities and a timeline for implementation, using your Growth Action Plan.
  2. Identifying the resources required to achieve the objectives in your Growth Action Plan.
  3. Embedding key management practices critical to growth and productivity in your business.

Course lead

Richard Cartwright is the Course Lead for the Help to Grow: Management course at the University of Southampton.

Register for the course

You can register for this course on the Small Business Charter website.

Register now

Connect

Contact us

We welcome email enquiries. Contact our Director of Knowledge Exchange and Enterprise, Professor Jeni Giambona

Executive Education

The course takes place in B175, Boldrewood Innovation Campus.
We're open Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm, UK time.