Educated at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark born Taus Nöhrlind has a working life with enterprise mentoring at its core. As well as running his own enterprise, Nöhrlind Ltd., which is dedicated to helping small and medium sized businesses enter international markets, he is a visiting fellow at Anglia Ruskin University (IOEE Centre of Excellence) where he’s working on a project related to the global expansion of businesses. We caught up with Taus to find out more.

Since setting up Nöhrlind Ltd. in the late 1990s, Taus Nöhrlind has worked closely with hundreds of businesses, primarily those that have a physical product or technological service they’re planning to export overseas. His role is to help small and medium sized businesses plan their approach to conquering foreign markets, as he explains:

“I help businesses grow internationally, taking a strategic approach to developing a plan for expanding. The work is mainly focused on developing different level of distributers and strong supply chains.”

In order to fulfil his remit, however, Taus becomes fully immersed in the workings of each business he helps. The approach is comprehensive and Taus leaves no stone unturned as he endeavors to improve his clients’ overseas business prospects. He says:

“We’re not only looking at how to build distribution channels across the world, but also at managing a business strategically. So we consider everything from supply chains to how things are managed internally, building customers and channel partners, and managing employees, finances and marketing strategies, plus anything that falls in between!”

Taus’s long career is rich with business development expertise. He started off working for a trading company in Denmark, dealing with import / export activity across 20 countries. Whilst working in this role, Taus completed a master’s degree in Strategic Management and International Business Expansion. Next, he was a partner in a management consultancy firm helping companies move between markets or uniting companies to enter new markets with combined force. In this role, the enterprise specialist also undertook trade missions on behalf of the Danish government. All of this has certainly equipped Taus with a vast and valuable range of experience, which is vital to him both in his working life and in his voluntary enterprise mentoring.

Having amassed his expertise over a number of years, Taus came to believe that much of the experience of attempting to enter international markets was universal, and that it would be possible to develop a model to help businesses avoid the common pitfalls and understand the best global approach to SME internationalisation. Working alongside Anglia Ruskin’s Professor Lester Lloyd-Reason, who leads in international enterprise strategy, Taus developed Guide2Growth, which is a research and method development project aiming to create a model for Accelerated Global Expansion for small and medium sized businesses, as he explains:

“Guide2Growth is about doing global research with the objective of improving the ways small and medium sized businesses internationalise and, ultimately, develop a model for Accelerated Global Expansion for SMEs. Everything you need as a small business looking to expand is out there – strategy consultants, UKTI, sales professionals, export managers, business angels, venture capital… but it’s not necessarily connected in a coherent structure and that is what we’re trying to do.”

It was through his work with Anglia Ruskin University that Taus came to attend an IOEE Meet a Mentor event held in Cambridge, as he recalls:

“I always liked working with entrepreneurs and start-up teams so I signed up to become a mentor. Throughout my career I’ve been something between a mentor, a coach, a consultant and a strategic adviser. It’s a whole mix of activities all focused on helping businesses move forward.”

For Taus there is one area where new businesses most often struggle, and that is in setting the right price framework for their product or service, as he explains:

“Start-ups find it very difficult to correctly predict how much they should charge. It’s very challenging to hit the right balance between volume, price and optimising profitability. I often see companies with a great idea who forget to think ahead and consider scalability. If you don’t scale up and think of the future long-term partners involved and the costs they introduce, your profit margins can be very squeezed.”

Mentoring is two-way process and over the years Taus has worked with a series of mentees, some on a one-off basis, others as an ongoing relationship. However long his mentoring relationships last, Taus finds them all to be rewarding:

“I simply enjoy listening to good ideas and contributing something helpful. I like the entrepreneurial environment and given how many business mistakes I have made over the years, I think I can be helpful to start-up teams, smoothing their paths just a little bit in the up hill struggle to get a business off the ground.”