Hybrid Estates - David Wood
Hybrid is a vibrant, innovative and dynamic company founded by a management team that firmly believes that quality is the key to success.
Our mission is to "supply the best resource and manpower available to meet your requirements". The service is aimed at estates and facilities management.
We base the success of our work on the level of professionalism delivered by our employees, servicing our clients’ needs at all times.
We provide a highly efficient and cost effective services package, delivered to you by your dedicated facilities manager - giving you peace of mind that your assets are in good hands. www.hybridestates.co.uk
Mentor: Julian Darwell Stone
David Wood was not looking for a mentor but read about Business Mentoring in a Chamber of Commerce newsletter and decided to enquire, he explained that “it was a free service and I thought I would see if there was anyone who would be interested in listening to me as I felt the company had potential for growth.”
David says that when he was matched with Julian Darwell Stone “I realised that Julian had a similar background to our business and particularly in areas we were looking to expand in.” Julian had recently become a mentor on the program he explained “I felt that I needed to give something back and wanted to help smaller and younger businesses find their feet using my experience in larger companies.” He agreed that they were a good match and stressed the importance of chemistry in mentoring relationships and that they had “clicked straight away.”
Initially David didn’t have a specific issue with his company but as Julian said “Mentoring is not meant to be about specifics but someone to bounce ideas off and work out the direction they are trying to go in and deal with specific issues as they arise, but at the end of the day the mentee has to make their own decisions.”
David said that Julian “advised us on how to approach other companies. I valued having someone to ask questions and to look over tenders and advise how to add value to them. We have some very big company clients and he had a wealth of experience of large companies which I had not. We also concentrated on the accuracy of our finances, he helped us tighten up on outgoings, monitoring how and what we spend our money on, making them work better for us. We were doing them ourselves and therefore having someone else’s input was invaluable and as a result we have doubled our turnover in a year.”
Julian is very modest and said that David would have got there in the end, but “they lacked procedure and needed to tighten up and have become more systematic as a result.” He addedthat it is “a very satisfying role which only takes up a few hours a month and it helped that David was very willing to listen and take action when needed.”
David concluded “Business Mentoring is a great idea and I would like to do it myself one day. At the end of the day it is a free service and I value having someone with experience to talk to who was not involved in my business and enabled me to step back and look differently at it. It is so easy to get blinded in running your own business. The mentoring process restores perspective.”
