Timothy Taylor’s take on university programme to transform their business
Business leaders at Timothy Taylor’s, Jane Jenkins and Nick Berkovits, tell The Business Desk what inspired them to take their large-scale SME Help to Grow with Leeds University Business School.
Timothy Taylor’s is an independently owned brewery that started out in 1858 in Keighley, West Yorkshire. It is still brewing very much to its traditional approach with no compromise on ingredients. Timothy Taylor bought the site because of the natural spring below.
We remain very true to our roots; we are a solid Yorkshire business that invests back into its operation to grow. We wanted to develop ourselves and increase our skills in certain areas and be able to contribute more to the business strategy. Breweries are no different to any other business, they are always changing and evolving.
We felt doing it with the University of Leeds would just have the edge, really. It worked in terms of getting there and the convenience of getting the train and just walking up to campus was excellent. Once we had done the first session, we thought thank goodness we came because of the quality of the organisation. Rebecca Padgett was fantastic; she wasn’t afraid to challenge the course material and it was really inspiring as the facilities are amazing.
We met an interesting mix of personalities from different businesses at different stages. One of our cohorts operated a care home and since the programme we’ve been over to do a beer tasting session with the residents there and they loved it.
There’s so much potential and it was inspiring looking at other people’s businesses and working with them and helping them, and vice versa.
We were the biggest SME on the programme, but it doesn’t matter what size of company you are; you have still got to do the same things. We would recommend larger scale SMEs consider sending two people from different functions; it enabled us to bounce ideas off each other well.
It is interesting spending time with another colleague from a different part of the business in the same room, listening to their perspective on things because we don’t have much time to talk to each other in the business. With it being a bigger business, we can often work in silos and communication is challenging, whereas doing this has brought us back together. Take the time to upskill, appreciate other people’s functions, focus on the strategy, and work on the business rather than in the business.
Key elements that we took from the programme were how we can digitally transform and develop our team even further. We used some of the tools from Help to Grow to train team members and we are now more focused on transmitting our new knowledge to help them work through projects using some of the tools we have learned.
We do not trade much internationally and so we are looking at using templates from the Help to Grow program to evaluate the opportunity for export. The philosophies taught in this course are pertinent to breweries as manufacturing facilities, now more than ever.
The power of mentoring within the programme was so beneficial and Mandy was very supportive, and she asked the right questions and taught us to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. She put sessions in our diaries from week one and if you needed to move them, that was not a problem, but at least they were there in your diary. We always knew when we needed to be in Leeds and could plan our work schedule accordingly.
It’s a real personal growth program as well as a company growth program, stimulating your brain and giving you the ability to help grow the business.
