Consultancy Testimonials

I’d been running a guitar school for eight years and business was going well, but not moving forward as much as I would have liked. I needed to find someone who had the experience and ideas on how to move forward.

The main challenge I was facing was losing clients as fast as I was gaining them. I was trying to get clients through the doors and working out how to generate more leads to make my business more profitable.

It was great to be able to bounce ideas off someone outside the business who knew my business. I could get a feel on what was a good idea and what was not a good idea. Alasdair also suggested other directions and referred me to a Google Ads expert who started running Google Ads for me.

Alasdair was really easy to get on with and I liked the sessions. It pushed me to get things done before the next meeting and I needed that accountability. I looked forward to the sessions and felt motivated afterwards.

Before working with Alasdair, my turnover was $8,000 - $10,000 per month and had been at that level for around three years. Now, we’re looking at $19,000 per month so it’s an increase of over 100%. He really has helped to put some momentum back in the business and exceeded the annual expected goal of $200,000.

I managed to get a bit of traction in my business but didn’t know how to take things to the next level. I had no experience of running a business before, and I knew I needed help with my overall strategy.

I felt quite overwhelmed trying to find the right resources and support. It was hard to know where I should invest my precious and limited funds, but I also knew that I needed to invest in order to grow. There are so many ‘experts’ out there.

I attended workshops one of Alasdair’s workshops at the British Library Business & IP Centre and saw how strict they are on who they partner with. I thought that if the British Library let Alasdair in front of people with these pretty important marketing workshops, he must be held in high regard. 

Alasdair encouraged me to focus on my core offering and how to leverage that before I did other things that I was interested in. He put ‘blinkers’ on me to concentrate on one thing at a time. He is a real geek, knows his stuff, delves into details and what he doesn’t know, he finds out.

He also opened the door on the importance of measurement and data which I had zero clue about. This has forced me to become more focused on my numbers.

Alasdair introduced me to his Google AdWords expert from the Grow Network who has really helped the business grow. He also introduced me to Alison Lewy from Fashion Angel where I successfully applied for a start-up loan.

For me, starting a business was like landing on a whole new planet and not really knowing anything about it. Alasdair took my hand and showed me around, telling me about the areas to avoid and how to navigate the terrain. 

He has a panoramic and holistic view and he’s a bit ‘Willy Wonka’! He makes the process quite enjoyable and genuinely gets small businesses – he’s a bit like talking to a really excited child!

He reassured me that when the timing was right, I could hire someone. This meant that I didn’t get excited too early or hire too early. I’m glad I listened to him – he is choc full of wisdom.

Yearly turnover has gone from £100,000 to £500,000 since we started working together. I kept running out of stock!

We were growing very rapidly and my key challenge was how to structure our marketing team. 

We needed to organise the team for maximum effectiveness, decide what each team member should be doing and clarify how they should work together. 

After attending one of Alasdair’s workshops at The British Library we worked together for a year and a half.

Alasdair is great, he has a kind heart and personally took the time to understand me and my business. Our sessions really helped me focus on what would contribute to our long term business growth.

He provided a very important sounding board as well as helping us with the key marketing metrics to focus on. Alasdair introduced us to lots of very useful people through his network.

After 18 months of working with Alasdair, our online sales increased from £20,000 per month to over £50,000 per month

In the 1st full year working together revenue has grown 81%, profit by 133% and costs are down by 20%.

Within 20 minutes of our 1st session, Alasdair identified the root cause of the problem.
Over the next 2 sessions with him, we built a robust and actionable plan for growth, that we then implemented. Those actions had and continue to have an immediate effect.

Perhaps equally importantly, Alasdair has provided an understanding and framework which means that all future changes can be bench-marked against our goals.

He's an interesting guy and works at your pace. He also will push and prod you, which may be uncomfortable to experience in the moment and comes from a good place, as he wants to and does help you get good results.
Use him!

We first met Alasdair as a guest lecturer at the School for Social Entrepreneurs. Before we worked with Alasdair, we were doing good work and winning lots of awards but we really didn’t have a clue how to develop our financial sustainability within the online community.

At the British Library Business And IP Centre, we gathered our social media manager, web-team and CEO who worked closely with Alasdair to build our online funding and engagement strategies. His advice was inspiring, creative and absolutely vital. Now, one year on and we're only half way through his to-do list….and boy, is it working!

As a result of us working with Alasdair, we have completely restructured our funding and monetisation strategy, developed new pop ups, redesigned our communications and branding and most importantly, found a new energy going forward. We still have lots to do but I can be sure that no other expert has had more impact on our growth and sustainability.

Thanks to Alasdair, Sky Badger has just been named a finalist in the Tech4Good Awards. We now reach over 1,000 families every day and since 2012 have helped over 1 million families struggling to find help for their disabled children.

Thank you, Alasdair. You’re Sky Badger’s marketing genius!

Grow’s marketing advice has added over £200,000 to our turnover this year – it’s been our best year yet!

Quotes for new work have increased by over 27% and we’ve managed to convert 20% more of these quotes.

Grow are really easy to work with and really are experts in generating new business.

Their work has increased our revenues by £289,000 over 5 years and this figure is still growing.

They are reliable and consistently excellent performers and were a joy to work with. They're methodical, concise and imaginative.

Grow have been instrumental to the growth and success of our business and their work has increased our revenues by £350,000 per annum. They ask good questions, have lots of ideas and they gave us plenty of spot-on practical guidance.

They worked with us to develop our sales script and sales philosophy, which we still use today. Grow have a positive 'can do' attitude and a proactive approach.

As a successful health products distributor, we wanted to move into selling products online. However, we didn’t have the experience or the knowledge.

We didn’t know how to do it and we had no clear strategy.

We heard about Alasdair and Grow by word-of-mouth. We then attended a Grow workshop at The British Library. We were impressed by Alasdair and we decided to work with him. We liked working with Alasdair because he is straight to the point, no BS. He brought a lot of expertise. He knows what he’s talking about.

Grow helped us to come up with a clear marketing strategy and supported us in finding the right talent to implement the strategy.

Following Alasdair’s advice, we launched our online business by selling our products on Amazon. With the revenues we made, we were then able to launch our own website.

When we started working with Grow, we were turning over £400 a month online. Two years later, we’re turning over £60,000 a month.

THANK YOU GROW!

I found Grow’s website while researching a problem I had with keyword analysis using Google Analytics.

I came across a blog written by Alasdair which I thought was good, leading me to Grow’s website.

I was interested in their work and decided to attend one of Grow’s workshops where I met Alasdair and spoke with him about our business.

Subsequently we decided to work with Grow and have Alasdair help us.

We wanted to grow the business, and knew that we needed some practical guidance; including improved online lead generation.

Alasdair’s help with lead generation and email marketing was eye opening.

Now month by month we are consistently receiving significantly more leads from our website and email marketing.

Alasdair helped set us up for the consistent future growth that we wanted, as well as helping us build the team that we needed.

The work that we did together was so fundamental it has changed everything.

We wanted to grow our business by laying the foundations for strong future growth. Alasdair’s work with us has ensured this.

We now anticipate significant growth that will far outweigh the very impressive short-term gains that we have already made as a result of this work.

Most importantly we had a lot of fun together while doing the necessary planning and brainstorming.

Thank you so much.

We were introduced to Alasdair at our acceleration cohort at the UK Lebanon Tech Hub. We had about a dozen mentors coaching us on different aspects of business. Most of them lectured AT us while Alasdair talked TO us.

The first thing you notice about Alasdair is his down-to-earth, hands-on approach to business training. There are so many moments in Alasdair's class where you think to yourself "That's brilliant yet to simple, why didn't I think of that before?!" - Well, it's mainly because your mentality was different before the class. Alasdair helps you see your business from angles you didn't know were visible before. He teaches you HOW to think instead of WHAT to think, which makes a massive difference in the amount of knowledge you walk out of his classes with.

The internet is full of information and there are many marketing experts out there. What separates the wheat from the chaff is whether or not a mentor can show you how to apply all the information he's given you directly to your business. Alasdair gives real-life examples, rather than throwing theories at you from a textbook that you're not sure what to do with.

Alasdair asked questions about our companies and encouraged us to ask him questions and get deeply involved in the discussions. That kept ideas moving around the room from the beginning of the class till the very end. People who never usually spoke out in class were actively participating.

Nobody got bored and everyone felt they had learned some valuable techniques and gained deeper insight into their businesses. Instead of running out for a smoke before the mentor even finished turning off the projector - as is usually the case after a class - many people stayed behind to ask even more questions.

His workshops are well-moderated yet with his interactive style of teaching, everybody in the room gets involved. Alasdair diverts from the traditional “passing of information” by making you give examples how these issues affect your own business, then shows how to use the information you've being given to actually improve and grow your business.

As the Founder and Director of a charity and social enterprise, I almost never pay for advice or courses.

However, I invested in Alasdair's courses and consultancy and it was one of the best 'returns' I've ever made: it has easily paid for itself and more, with increases in sales and donations.

He made me see not just my marketing but my business in a totally different way - and it was great fun all the way through!

Personal Touch Fitness were exploring ways to expand the business and needed advice regarding sales and marketing techniques and options.

We chose to work with Grow based on the recommendations that we had heard.

Working with Grow gave us a number of options to expand our network, improve our client relationship management, and to keep contacting customers until we got a definite Yes or No.

Since then, PTF have been successful in managing a customer pipeline with new clients coming in and new business being created.

Alasdair is easy and informal to work with which suited PTF. We were in the infancy stages of developing a Sales and Marketing strategy and the ideas that came out of the brainstorming sessions have proved useful.

Our client base has grown. We added many new smaller clients on top of the 3 to 4 main clients we had before. We can now offer a wider range of services and have an integrated online booking system to manage all appointments. As a result, we estimate that our online turnover p.a. increased by 50%.

We turned to Grow for guidance on how to best reach our varied target audiences when launching our mobile app.

Alisdair immediately understood our objectives, the diverse nature of our intended audience, and the challenges we faced in messaging and dissemination.

His assistance was invaluable in helping us to develop an outreach approach for each audience and to consolidate the approaches into what has been a very successful overall strategy.

Grow were very easy to work with and their brainstorming and exploration techniques helped us to quickly identify the gaps in our existing marketing plan.

They helped us see the bigger picture, advised us on direct marketing and stressed the importance of a proper marketing database.  Grow helped us to get all our stakeholders on board and encouraged us to consider lots of aspects we hadn’t thought of before.

They are great with strategy and their experience was very valuable to us.  Their work even seemed to increase awareness of our event for the subsequent year too.

Alasdair is a beast, a marketing beast. He is blunt and very honest with his opinion. He will not sugar coat it for you. He can extract the best in you, challenge you into giving your business the best of yourself. Very experienced and easy to work with.

He is very modest and always open to suggestions. Very well aware of what are the new trends in his field. Excellent mentor. Proud to have worked with him and will always seek guidance through out my journey.

Grow helped us find creative ways of solving the marketing issues we were facing. We were encouraged to focus on particular market sectors, to work out our niche and identify the best markets for us to operate in.

Grow helped us to generate lots of new ideas relating to our Sales and Marketing strategy. I really enjoyed working with Alasdair. He’s inspirational, inspiring, intelligent and full of great ideas – his enthusiasm is infectious!

When we first met Grow our weekly turnover was £5,000. After only 3 sessions, and through putting our bespoke action plan into practice, our weekly turnover has now almost doubled – delivering an incremental £96,000 over 6 months.

Grow has enabled us to survive during the economic downturn – the techniques we have learnt and tools we have acquired have helped us to not only survive but also ‘grow’ our business.

We've increased our sales by £25,000 thanks to the new business development plan we created with Grow.

Grow worked with us to develop a structured approach to getting new business and greatly improved the way we went about getting new business leads.” We found it very useful to have a trustworthy outside opinion on our strategy for developing the business.

Grow have the personal touch and grasped our needs swiftly – we’ve already recommended them to other companies we know.

When we met Alasdair, our turnover was approximately £214,000. After working with Grow, our turnover was around £608,000.

Before we started to work with Grow, we were a new company who wanted to market our business and products. Our goals were to increase the awareness of our brand and increase sales but as we had no background in marketing, we didn’t really know what approach to take. We had no marketing strategy in place.

I attended one of Grow’s workshops at The British Library taught by Alasdair. I asked a couple of questions during the workshop and then Alasdair and I had a brief chat afterwards; he suggested having a meeting to see how he could help us.

Alasdair helped us address our issues. He made us analyse our brand and identify who our customers are. He made us more focused and targeted. He also made us brainstorm on the product range we can offer and helped us put together a strategy which we refined each time we had a session with him. Alasdair really challenged our pre-conceptions and helped us think and brainstorm to identify new areas of growth and new marketing plans.

We enjoy working with Grow because Alasdair has a great personality. He is always fun and entertaining. We also like the collaborative process during the sessions. But we always leave the session with an action plan and work to do on our end. Alasdair doesn’t expect that he will do the work for us. It’s really up to us.