Leicestershire based A S Miles Consulting has expanded its revenues and secured a series of game changing client wins after completing the 90% government funded Help to Grow: Management Course.
Andy Miles founded A S Miles Consulting after spotting a gap in the market when he was asked to help a fellow transport operator with a compliance project.
By the end of day one, A S Miles had six new clients. Now 11 years later, the Barlestone based business has provided management consultancy services to more than 1000 fleets, helping businesses and their transport operations to remain safe, compliant and profitable. A well known figure in the industry, Andy and his team work with transport and logistics businesses to enhance their efficiency and quality through regulatory compliance and process improvement. The team offers consulting, auditing, mentoring and training.
After making the leap to running the business full time in 2015, Andy soon found his small family business in high demand. While he had a great grounding in the industry after an apprenticeship with Norbert Dressentangle, he didn’t have the experience of running and scaling a business. It was at this point that Andy heard about Help to Grow: Management, a 12 week course designed to support business leaders to increase their resilience, innovation, and growth.
Andy Miles, managing director and founder of A S Miles Consulting, said: ‘I had hit a wall. I had got as far as I could with my first class honours degree in the school of hard knocks but I was getting frustrated with myself because I felt that I didn’t know enough to take the business further. I didn’t know what I didn’t know.’
Andy credits his participation in the course with several significant changes that have taken the business to the next level but weren’t on the horizon before he started the Help to Grow: Management Course. These include setting up a second company called A S Miles Support Services to sell complementary, transport related services and ramping up the company’s marketing activity.
‘Before the course most of our business came from referrals; we weren’t doing any marketing. This was a strength but also a weakness as we hadn’t marketed ourselves or learnt how to do that. The course massively squashed our marketing learning curve. We now understand how to target larger companies and how our messaging needs to be tweaked for this audience. As a result, we are winning business with multinational companies with fleets up to 15,000 vehicles. Previously, we just wouldn’t have been able to get our foot in the door.’ The business has now grown by 15%.
Andy added, ‘The frameworks you study on the course make you think about doing things differently. A S Miles Support Services complements our existing consultancy services but also provides a much shorter sale cycle. The growth graph looks very similar to how we grew the first company of how this is growing but the timeline is compressed. We have achieved around 24 to 30 months of progress in the first nine months.’
Following learnings from the organisational design module, he also promoted one of the team to a general management role freeing up Andy to go out and grow the business and develop a succession plan.
‘The organisational design was a valuable takeaway module from the course. It got us really thinking about succession planning as a family business,’ continued Andy. ‘We are now preparing the next generation of leadership with an investment in leadership training for the whole team and creating a three year plan which will allow me to transition to chair of the business in 2029 but still be around to provide support where it is required.
‘Alongside these big changes in the business, we have also become a lot more efficient as a team. We redeveloped the plan three times in the last year because we have progressed so quickly. Overall, it has transformed our approach and trajectory – it has been a huge boost to productivity.’
Flora Hamilton, executive director of the Small Business Charter, which delivers the Help to Grow: Management Course, said: ‘Andy embodies the resilience and ambition that drive small business success. He faced crossroads in his journey when he felt stuck, but he found the Help to Grow: Management Course with the University of Leicester School of Business, which gave him the right knowledge and frameworks to transform the future of his business.
‘Andy already had deep industry expertise as a subject matter expert, but it is been inspiring to see how the Help to Grow: Management Course helped him grow as a business leader and develop a growth action plan which he and the team have delivered against. The programme exists to empower leaders like Andy to scale up and unlock their full potential.’
The Help to Grow: Management Course is a 90% government funded leadership programme for SME businesses, delivered by a network of Small Business Charter accredited business schools. The course runs over 12 weeks and includes online and face to face sessions, one to one mentoring and peer networking.