Two new cohorts of the Help to Grow: Management programme are now open for applications, with sessions starting in September and November 2026.
Delivered by the University of Bath School of Management, the 12-week programme supports business owners and senior leaders to step back from the day-to-day and look properly at how their organisations are led, structured and prepared for growth.
As places open, two Swindon business owners have spoken candidly about what the experience actually meant for them, and why they’d encourage others not to wait.
“You don’t know what you don’t know”
Gareth Taylor had been running Inception, his Swindon-based IT services company, for more than 20 years when he reached a turning point. From the outside, the business looked stable, over £1 million turnover, around 20 people employed locally. Internally, Gareth felt something else.
“I’d been talking about wanting to grow the business for years,” he says. “But after 20 years, you reach a point where you realise you know how to run what you’ve got – not necessarily how to grow it beyond that.”
He almost didn’t apply. Without a degree or formal qualifications, he questioned whether a university programme was really for him. His wife, a Bath alumna, persuaded him to look. When he did, the response he got shifted something: he was told he was exactly the kind of person the programme was designed for.
What surprised him most wasn’t the content, it was the people. Being in a room with other business owners who were willing to be honest about the messy reality of running a company, not just the polished version they put on LinkedIn, turned out to be unexpectedly powerful. “We all present the glossy ten percent,” he says. “Being in a room where people are honest about the other ninety is something else.”
The programme pushed Gareth to ask harder questions about growth itself — not just how to achieve it, but whether his business was genuinely ready for it. Systems, processes, team wellbeing. Things that are easy to overlook when you’re busy delivering. “I came away realising that actually, I am enough,” he says. “That the experience I’ve built over 20 years has real value.”
“It felt like the right time to sense check what we were doing”
Stu Olden’s situation looked quite different on paper. He founded SDO Associates in 2022, a company supporting small and medium-sized engineering firms entering the defence and aerospace supply chain, and within a few years had grown from a one-person operation to a team of ten, alongside more than 50 specialist associates.
Rapid growth, he found, brings its own pressures. The defence and aerospace sector around Swindon is expanding fast, with significant investment and job creation expected in the years ahead. Keeping pace operationally is a real challenge for businesses in that ecosystem.
“It’s quite a scary time,” he says. “Going from a single person company to employing people, putting systems in place, becoming a grown-up business.”
With demand increasing, instinct and experience alone no longer felt like enough. “I don’t know everything. It felt like the right time to step back and sense check what we were doing.”
For Stu, the programme’s strategy module came as an immediate practical help, not abstract theory, but something he could put on paper and build around. That structure has since shaped not just how SDO Associates operates, but how the firm advises its own clients navigating similar scaling challenges. “We’re now using that approach with the companies we support,” he says.
Access to mentoring mattered too. “Just having an hour away from the business to talk through a challenge with someone experienced was powerful.” And the mix of industries in the cohort, people doing completely different things, bringing perspectives from well outside defence, pushed him to think about his own business differently.
His view on value of the programme is direct. “Cash is king. For what we paid, it was huge value. A really good investment.”
About the programme
Help to Grow: Management is open to business owners, founders and senior managers from organisations with between 5 and 249 employees, trading for at least one year. The programme is 90% government-funded, with participants contributing just £750. Businesses with 10 or more employees can send two people at a 20% discount.
New cohorts begin on 24 September and 18 November 2026. Places are limited.
Please contact edo@management.bath.ac.uk for more details
