Streatley: Agileering MD awarded 'Thames Valley Mentor of the Year'

Mark Neild, managing director of Streatley-based innovation and leadership coaching business Agileering, has been named 'Thames Valley Region Mentor of the Year'.

The award, which was presented at the Royal Institution on March 26, is in recognition of his coaching of African entrepreneurs through the charity Grow Movement.

Claire Jenkins, Grow Movement CEO, noted: “As well as inspiring his Rwandan client to new heights, Mark has been doing amazing things to support Grow Movement consultants more widely. His insights into best practice in motivating and enabling our clients, and explaining when teaching, coaching or mentoring work best, are hugely appreciated by our volunteer consultants.”

In the Thames Valley, Neild is well known for his role as mentor-in-residence at Reading’s new innovation hub Grow@Green Park, which launched last summer.

Co-founder Adam Clark praised his talent for cutting through complexity, saying: "Mark sees the bigger picture clearly but also is exceptionally good at all those fiddly details you miss when you're too close to your own business.”

Neild is also a regular judge for the City Spark startup competition and coached at the Oxford Launch event at Said Business School.

Thames Valley SMEs benefit from his expertise in strategy and leadership coaching through Growth Accelerator, the government-backed scheme that supports business growth in smaller firms.  He is also known for coaching sailing on the Thames at Goring.

In January, Neild took over as chairman of Grow Movement and he is now leading the charity through its own major growth programme.

His first tasks were to commission a new workflow and knowledge management system and enter a collaboration agreement with the London Business School for a breakthrough study into the impact of entrepreneur education on alleviating poverty in Uganda.

“We are running 600 projects with entrepreneurs in Uganda in the second half of this year – the scale is challenging, but the opportunity to work with a prestigious institution to prove how coaching entrepreneurs leads to growth is fantastic.

"We are really keen to recruit more business people to coach the least developed African businesses, and use phone and video conferencing so no need to travel, making it the most cost-effective economic growth program of its kind.”