Bren doesn’t claim to know your business and your market place better than you – you are the best team to develop your vision and strategy. Bren’s role is to ask the tricky questions, challenge spoken assumptions, uncover unspoken assumptions and to help you consider other options.

This includes helping you understand and improve business performance, supporting you in making more money for less effort:

• How aligned is your strategy with your capabilities?
• Where do you make money, where do you lose it?
• What gives you energy and what drains it?

And throughout, you stay in the driving seat – you identify with the output; you are in charge of your future. Bren’s role is to help you reflect, to improve your skills in uncovering and interrogating key assumptions and to dare to tell you what you might not want to hear…

“Two roads diverged in a wood and I, I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference.” Robert Frost

Funders come in various guises – working capital facilities, growth debt, venture capital, private equity, trade sales.

No matter what the source, credibility is key when raising or renewing funding. Bren has a strong reputation for generating robust and flexible business plans and helping you deliver sound due diligence which stands up to scrutiny and stress testing.

What does this involve? Before engaging with funders, Bren can appraise your strategy alongside your numbers with a view to finding gaps in the story. She can help you perform comprehensive stress-testing on the narrative and the numbers, before working with you to craft solutions. You can then present robust plans to potential funders alongside convincing answers to “what-if?” questions.

In summary, by bringing a cold eye and objective challenge, she will help you to craft a plan which gives funders confidence in you and your business.

“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” Winston Churchill

Implementing strategy and delivering results almost always require change. Managing people and businesses during times of change is one of the most difficult challenges that leadership teams face; it is easy to under-estimate people’s fear of change and the amount of time successful change demands.

Acting in senior roles in entrepreneurial businesses undertaking comprehensive change, Bren has been successful in transforming operations, creating value and making change happen by bringing people with her. She can coach and support you in the key aspects of change, including design, carrying people with you, implementation and measuring success.

“Close some doors. Not because of pride, incapacity or arrogance, but simply because they no longer lead somewhere.” Paulo Coelho