Manchester's tech and digital ecosystem is blessed with a host of talented freelancers. Our series, Freelancer Focus aims to give our freelancers the chance to raise their profile via our digital community.
Today's Freelancer Focus meets Sarah Knight's Mind The Gap, a training and coaching arm of Mash Communications.
Tell us about your company?
Mind The Gap is a training and coaching company with a difference. We specialise in providing tailored training and coaching to all manner of communications consultancies and agencies to help drive performance and growth and crucially retain happy, skilled, motivated staff.
We work with the agency or the individuals to establish goals and to understand the areas for development, and then we hone our training courses and programmes to help you plug your gaps.
We’ve worked with some of the biggest, oldest, smallest and new start-up agencies to provide a wide range of training to upskill and push forward individuals and those businesses.
And our support doesn’t stop there: We work with teams and individuals on an ongoing basis to coach them through their development and offer the guidance and support that allows businesses to reach their true potential.
Mind the Gap has been founded by Sarah Knight who has more than 25 years frontline experience in agencies, building businesses, developing teams and marketing those businesses. She, supported by trainers who are also experts in their fields, brings her expertise and insight to your organisation helping you to develop skills, culture, performance and productivity.
Mind The Gap is part of Mash Communications.
What led you to set up your own business?
Well I’d love to say it was due to my burning ambition to run my own consultancy – but in reality it was down to circumstance and need. I was running a big team in a business that disappeared when the dot.com bubble burst and so I decided to have a crack on my own – and 18 years later here I am.
Do you have a unique proposition? What is it?
I’m not a massive fan of the word unique (sorry) but what makes Mind The Gap different to many other training offerings out there is that it’s real. I understand the plate spinning that’s happens in agencies, I get the stress of client demands because I’ve been there. I’ve grown up in agency life. This means you get practical, realistic solutions that have worked with agencies I have worked for and with – all delivered with a smile, some fun (hopefully) and maybe the odd swear word.
What is your company’s biggest achievement?
I’m still here : ) Eighteen years of enjoying what I do and evolving the business year on year. Change has happened quite naturally from delivering PR-centric strategies to developing social media and content offerings, to building and integrating content, social and PR teams in agencies to realising how much I loved and cared about the people I work with and being able to focus on the training and development of them.
What do you think the future looks like for Manchester’s digital and tech sector?
I think it really is growth time. This is when businesses in the digital arena really can thrive. In these strange times digital agencies have the opportunity, they carry the ace and the next 12 months should be a period of evolving offerings, developing teams and watching the digital and tech sector in Manchester boom.
Tell us something we might not know about your business?
When the daughter was doing her GCSE’s, I stupidly decided it would be a good idea if I studied something at the same time. I thought we could ‘work together,’ study together and I could do something I’ve been passionate about for a long time. So I started training to be a Pilates teacher. Six months later I qualified. However I can confirm that thinking of studying something at the same time as your offspring are going through exams is a very stupid idea. I also did a hell of a lot more work for three exams than she did for all her ninety billion GCSE exmas. However the teacher training – and the subsequent teaching of Pilates evolved my business to what it is today. It cemented how much I enjoyed teaching, training and helping people develop and grow. And that led to the birth of Mind The Gap.
Are you a freelancer that would like to raise the profile of your business?
If so, contact thom@manchesterdigital.com for more details.
