The Creative Quarter is providing retail, hospitality, leisure and personal services businesses with free mentoring opportunities. Take a look through our list of experts below, and if you think you and your business could benefit from their support, register your interest for mentoring by filling out the short form here.
Emma Torrance
Emma is a SFEDI qualified independent business adviser helping with running & understanding complexities of running a business including business planning & finances.
She is used to being at the sharp end of retail and hospitality businesses having co-owned a cafe, gallery and meeting venue in Nottingham City Centre, enjoying successes and failures and earning valuable insights and wisdom along the way.
Emma has an MBA and have been involved in supporting and mentoring other businesses for two decades, so understands both the theory and the practical realities of running your own business. She provides one-to-one coaching, mentoring and workshops to freelancers, small private businesses and social enterprises across a range of sectors including creative, music, food, IT, educative, hospitality, leisure and retail.
Steve Hobbs
An experienced facilitator and executive coach, Steve Hobbs inspires curiosity, provides clarity and instigates action among the business leaders and teams he works with in the UK and internationally. He helps entrepreneurs and start-ups become ‘unstuck’ when they’ve reached a point in their development where they’re not clear… what’s next?.
By asking better (and sometimes challenging) questions, Steve’s honest, practical and engaging approach to coaching, mentoring and facilitation helps make sense of a business situation in a human way, setting individuals and teams up to move forward in a positive direction.
Working with innovative and entrepreneurial academic institutions, including the London Business School and some of the top UK accountancy firms, Steve has developed leadership programmes for senior level executives to unlock strategic thinking.
Suzy Rai
Suzy is an experienced and creative marketer. For the past 25 years, she has helped individuals and organisations shape compelling stories that sell their products and services.
Her experience spans all sectors and sizes of organisation from micro businesses selling their handmade wares online to large Blue Chip companies looking to improve their productivity, performance and engage their stake holders.
Suzy specialises in positioning a business in the context of its values, helping identify their core target markets and shaping campaigns that engage with customers and sell products.
Assim Ishaque
Assim is a multi award-winning inventor who has won numerous pitches and millions of pounds for his projects. But more usefully, he has learned lessons through many business failures that he does not hide from.
Assim started his career with HSBC after studying Accounting and Finance, after which he moved into a sales career in Retail, Consumer Goods and then Telecoms. He established The Entrepreneurs Trust to share the truth about being an entrepreneur through his podcasts, seminars and workshops. He also advises innovation driven enterprises in their scale up journey and delivers unique entrepreneurial seminars with leading accelerators across Europe. Assim focuses on the entrepreneur’s challenges, their inner self and business process and separates these from the individual to allow a direct pain free solutions to be created.
Jeanne Booth
Jeanne is an entrepreneur and businesswoman who, in her own words has been around the block a few times, making money and losing money and learning the key (and sometimes not so obvious) things that can make or break a business and its owner. She has owned and run two High St retail and hospitality businesses.
Jeanne has been mentoring other business owners for over two decades, and learnt a lot, as well as achieving an MBA from the Open University.
Chris Hayes
For over 30 years Chris has worked within the retail industry, from multi-national chain stores through to their suppliers, including ten years retail management and many more in strategic operations.
Starting initially as a trainee manager tasked with learning many different areas of retailing, he progressed into managing his own teams in small and large environments.
For the past 8 years he has been working as a self-employed business development partner, supporting SME’s & start-ups, understanding where they are and helping them get to where they need to be.
