Mark has dedicated most of his life to helping young people to achieve their true potential. That moment when the “penny drops” and people realise how much influence they have over their future destiny is priceless. The path to fulfilment shines brightly before them and off they go to greatness.
Mark started his career as a frontline aviator in the Royal Navy, subsequently flying instructor and finally Chief Flying Instructor. Developing capable, but under-confident aircrew into highly performing airborne leaders was a real highlight.
Joining PA Consulting, he worked on a number of technology innovation and transformation projects with clients including the Cabinet Office, major telecoms and media companies and several investors becoming Head of the Technology Innovation Unit, helping clients make sense of which emerging technologies most mattered to them and teaching junior consultants leadership and personal effectiveness skills.
Since leaving corporate life he has worked with over 4000 early stage founders on 4 continents as volunteer and subsequently chairman of Grow Movement a charity that coaches micro SMES in Africa over Skype as well as through Grow Inspires a social venture he founded to help excluded minorities start businesses to overcome the discrimination many faced when seeking jobs. He has worked with over 50 ex—offenders, instilling the confidence and capability to sell their skills directly to customers, achieving a status in society that is rightfully theirs.
He joined the University of Bristol part time in 2018 to “teach” entrepreneurship achieving rapid promotion to Associate Professor and directs the programme that has supported nearly 100 student start-ups. He has contributed to 3 books on creativity and innovation leadership, written a fourth and edited another. He is an advisor to The Entrepreneur’s Network working on policies to promote social justice and transformative enterprise education to inspire the next generation of innovators. Grow Inspires worked with over 250 unemployed young people during the pandemic to give them work experience and the skills to show their true potential to employers.
Entrepreneurship is a fabulous tool for social inclusion and the experience of coaching clients in Africa showed me that you don’t need expensive resources and education to be successful, but rather to follow a counter-intuitive process with dedication and resilience. That process has now been codified into Phoenix, a programme that has enjoyed great success with ex-offenders and long-term unemployed. Education is only part of the transformation, the real power comes when people start to take control of their destiny.
LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/markneild
