Last year, as part of the BBA IOEE mentoring programme, University of Worcester postgraduate student and aspiring entrepreneur Sarah Mitton was matched up with Tim Newman, a Commercial Banking Relationship Director at Lloyds Banking Group. We caught up with them both to find out more.

A few years ago Sarah Mitton was working for UnLtd, an organisation that supported people to set up social enterprises. As part of her role, she would facilitate mentoring connections but she had never either mentored or been mentored herself. That was to change a year into her postgraduate degree at the University of Worcester when she decided to start her own business. She recalls:

“When I started my masters in Leadership and Management in 2014 I was quite heavily pregnant. Once I’d had my daughter I just felt that I didn’t want to go back to the job I’d been doing because it was a lot of travel. So, about a year into the course, last October, I decided to set up on my own. We were halfway through the programme and that was around the time the mentoring became available too.”

Sarah’s course was part of Worcester University’s innovative Momentum Programme. This initiative represented a new direction for the institution. Funding had been secured from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) to run a pilot scheme that would support executive Masters students in their enterprising endeavours, as well as their formal education. As part of that Sarah was given the opportunity to access the British Banking Association/IOEE mentoring scheme, which matches banking profession mentors with those just setting out on their enterprise journey. She says:

“Momentum was a bit of an experimental project for the university. Half of the students on my course were working in an existing company and the other half were looking to set up businesses. I began as someone who was working for a company and then partway through the course decided to set up my storytelling business.”

Rhubarb Rhubarb Creatives, Sarah’s business, is now up and running. The specialist arts organisation takes storytelling to its clients for events, training and outreach purposes. Sarah, who works alongside 25% shareholder and business partner Charlotte Brennan, explains how the business idea came to her:

“For my thirtieth birthday my friends bought me a book which was called The Moth. It was about a storytelling movement that had begun in New York. People would go along to live gigs and stand up to tell short, five minute stories.”

Sarah’s interest deepened when she began listening to some of the stories themselves as podcasts as she looked after her tiny new-born daughter:

“The stories were really moving and they sparked my interest in how we all have stories to tell but how, often, they get lost over time because we have no way of archiving them. My business sprung from an interest in how we can capture people’s stories and also use them as a tool, for example, for community cohesion.”

In November 2015, when Rhubarb Rhubarb Creatives was in its very early days, Sarah was told she could have a mentor from Lloyds Bank. She took the opportunity and was matched with Tim Newman. Tim has been a Relationship Director at Lloyds Bank Commercial Banking for around 20 years. He has a portfolio of corporate clients who are typically turning over between £25 million and £100 million each year. Initially, Sarah had some reservations about being matched with someone whose background was so different from her own. She says:

“I thought ‘oh, that’s not going to work. I’m in such a different world from him.’ But actually, in terms of our personalities we’re a good mentoring match. He’s a very creative person, even though he operates in a completely different sector.”

In his day-to-day role, Tim’s responsibility is to manage his clients’ entire relationship with Lloyds Bank, while also securing more business from those clients and from other prospects. By contrast, as a mentor he works with those at the embryonic stages of starting up. However, by the time Tim met Sarah he had already proven his mentoring credentials as working with Worcester University students wasn’t his first foray into mentoring. He started off four years ago, having undertaken the IOEE’s mentoring training. His first mentees were from Aston University Business Schools and, before lending Rhubarb Rhubarb Creatives a helping hand, he had also been connected to two other small start-ups via the IOEE’s close association with Lloyds. So, when he first put himself forward for the task of enterprise mentoring, what was the motivating factor for Tim? He says:

“I knew mentoring would be a role completely separate from my day job. It was a way of using the skills I’ve acquired over so many years of working with larger corporates. I believed those would be useful in terms of supporting start-up businesses, which is the way that it’s gone so far.”

In fact, Tim often feels that his start-up mentoring task is a ‘scaled down’ version of working with the huge corporations he’s accustomed to supporting in his day job. He says:

“The issues and challenges are very similar. You might put a few noughts on the end of the figures but fundamentally the theory of running a business is the same whatever the size. The need for the basics – for planning, research and sound financial skills are very much the same regardless of whether you’re a pre-turnover business or a £100 million business.”

Sarah and Tim have been meeting face-to-face every four to six weeks for around a year now and each of them has found the process fulfilling. Sarah says:

“At first it was about Tim finding out about my business and coming up with some long and short term objectives. Now, he’ll set some homework and follow up on key points via email between our meetings. It might be that we go through a stakeholder agreement, my website, or my business plan… he helps me to find solutions in the areas where I’m struggling.”

As with all the best mentoring exchanges, it isn’t only the mentee who benefits and Tim himself has found the relationship very rewarding. He says:

“It’s great to be able to see a small seed businesses flourish and prosper. The enthusiasm of someone who has ambition at that stage is contagious. I get a great buzz from it to be honest. It’s so different from the day job. I’m there dealing with established businesses, that have been through the early stages many, many, many years ago so it’s great to go back to basics.”

Over his years of mentoring different types of people running all sorts of enterprises, Tim has come to understand that the best mentors are those who know when to hang back and let the mentee take the lead, as he explains:

“I think to be a mentor you have to be a good listener and you have to avoid the trap of jumping to solutions – you need to be a good facilitator and empathiser, but not someone who says ‘you have to do it this way.’”

This approach certainly seems to be working for Sarah, whose business is steadily growing as she develops her entrepreneurial skills, taking guidance from Tim at every stage:

“The things Tim has been able to impart have been so useful and he’s really helped me to move from being a creative arty person, to thinking more clearly about the practical business side of what I’m trying to do. Just to have his ongoing encouragement has been brilliant, to be honest. Really fantastic.”

If you’d like to learn more about Sarah’s business, visit her Facebook page or follow her on Twitter @tworhubarbs