This month saw the inaugural Mentorsme Excellence in Enterprise Mentoring Awards. The awards were designed to highlight the part enterprise mentoring plays in supporting and growing many small businesses. They recognised mentoring relationships that are delivering excellence in Growth, Start-Up, Diversity, Exporting and Innovation. All of the nominees and winners from the event can be found here.

We were especially delighted that Moorish picked up the Excellence in Growth Award at the event for businesses that have developed a growth strategy that has achieved outstanding levels of sales, profit or market share. CEO of Moorish, Julie Waddell, was introduced to her mentor through an IOEE led scheme which helps business owners find mentoring support from volunteer bank mentors.

Moorish is a high-end food business providing an original smoked humous product to Waitrose and independent delis across the UK with its unique recipe devised by Julie.

When developing the business, Julie's main concern was that she did not have a clear understanding of the financial aspects of the business and how each decision she made would have a significant impact on all aspects of the business – an issue of increasing importance as her product was in great demand.

Chris Sallnow, her mentor (a retired banker) was able to support Julie through this, and also helped her to focus on how she could grow her business.

As a first step Chris allowed Julie to recognise how important it was to protect her IP and then helped her focus on her customer base. As a consequence Julie has now secured a contract with British Airways to provide her product to business class passengers and those in club lounges. She is now also exporting to Hong Kong and supplying a broad range of retailers across the UK as well as being in talks with some major supermarket chains.

For more information on the IOEE managed programmes to connect business owners with bank mentors, please contact IOEE mentoring manager, Christine Dryden.