Grow's Award Winning Chairman!

Mark Neild Grow Chair with CMI CEO

At the Royal Institution on 26 March, Mark Neild, MD of Reading based Agileering Ltd Cass Business School Alumni and ILM Fellow was awarded Mentor of the Year 2014 for the Thames Valley Region.  Nominated for his work coaching African entrepreneurs through the charity Grow Movement, CEO Claire Jenkins noted “As well as inspiring his Rwandan client to new heights, Mark has been doing amazing things to support Grow Movement consultants more widely. His insights into best practice in motivating and enabling our clients; and explaining when teaching, coaching or mentoring works best are hugely appreciated by our volunteer consultants.  His patient pragmatic coaching style is highly effective.” 

In the UK, Mark is best known as one of the Mentors in residence at Reading’s new innovation hub Grow@Green Park, which launched in summer 2014. Co-founder Adam Clark praised Mark’s “great talent for cutting through complexity - getting straight to "cause and effect". He sees the bigger picture clearly but also is exceptionally good at all those fiddly details you miss when you're too close to your own business.”    Mark is also a mentor and judge for the City University City Spark startup competition and coached at the Oxford Launch event at Said Business School last autumn.  Thames Valley SMEs benefit from his expertise in strategy and leadership coaching through Growth Accelerator the Government backed scheme that supports business growth in smaller firms.

In January, Mark took over as Chairman of Grow Movement and is now leading the charity through its own major growth program to deliver 100 times more impact by 2020.  His first tasks were to commission a new workflow and knowledge management system and enter a collaboration agreement with the London Business School for a breakthrough study into the impact of entrepreneur education on alleviating poverty in Uganda.  “We are running 600 projects with entrepreneurs in Uganda in the second half of this year – the scale is a little nerve-racking, but the opportunity to prove that effective coaching leads to growth is fantastic.  We are really keen to recruit more business people to volunteer at www.GrowMovement.org.   We use phone and video conferencing so there is no need to travel, making it by far the most cost-effective economic growth