At Manchester Digital, we like to interview our members to find out a bit more about what they do and their work in the Greater Manchester digital and technology sphere. This week, we're speaking with Matt Wilden, Founder & MD of RENCAI Group.
Please introduce yourself...
We’re the RENCAI Team; we work with clients, educators, and young professionals of the future across our two businesses.
RENCAI - founded 12 years ago, partners with leadership teams in start-ups and fast-growth SME”s that have ambitious scale-up ambitions.
In 2024, we founded RENCAI Futures – with a mission to impact 10,000 learners a year by supporting students and young professionals to be more impactful in their first professional roles using our data-driven solutions.
Can you share the story behind the founding of RENCAI and RENCAI Futures, and what inspired you to create each business.
I worked in Global change & technology transformation projects for 10yrs before founding RENCAI. I’d observed that despite the technology stack being implemented, projects were only truly successful if the delivery team understood each other well enough to identify relative strengths, weaknesses and ambitions as a group. Using this insight to create project delivery plans that maximised the potential of this unique group. This level of understanding (before collaborating) between leadership and project teams was and still is rare!
This led to the founding of RENCAI with the vision to empower individuals and teams, using data, to redesign and optimise their way of working. And design plans to elevate the clear business performance impact they can have as a unique group.
RENCAI now has a series of solutions that enable businesses to scale more successfully alongside creating a culture of high engagement and performance. We’ve tailored these solutions to be appropriate for company sizes of 4-200+ employees.
Our impact areas to support scale-up businesses can be categorised in four areas of:
- Strategy Design
- Operational Efficiency Design
- Leadership Impact Development
- Performance Coaching
My RENCAI Futures, co-founder Andy Hall joined the RENCAI team in late 2023 to head up our Coaching practice. Our shared values and passion to make a more significant impact became a constant point of discussion weekly.
This was happening alongside our growing awareness of the increasing risk for SMEs to employ inexperienced professionals and the alarming unemployment statistics for the 16yr– 24-year-old age groups.
This passion for making a positive impact and disrupting how the current education system prepares young people for the world of work led to RENCAI Futures being born.
Today, Andy, Sheena and I are actively working with colleges and students across Greater Manchester with the goal of scaling up our support across the North West region for the next academic year.
Can you discuss the importance of leadership impact development in scaling a business and how RENCAI supports this?
When investors look at business valuation potential, leadership capability is always a key metric.
Our data shows that for a business to reach scale-up potential, one of the key foundations must be high-performing leadership teams with mature succession planning. At this key stage of growth, the top tiers of leadership still have a significant impact on the internal culture and external perception of the business.
Through our discussions with Founders and PE & VC houses, we could see a gap for leadership development programmes linked to improved business performance outcomes, with most LD programmes traditionally focusing on soft-skills competency development.
To elevate leadership impact that can be felt by employees and investors, we believe you need to focus on both.
We developed a range of data-driven leadership impact development solutions that create high-performing leaders and a high-engagement culture within the business. Partnering with leaders to evolve their focus and accountabilities as the team and business progress through key business maturity milestones.
RENCAI has collaborated with clients across various sectors, including Digital, Tech, Telecommunications and Professional Services. Could you share a success story highlighting your impact on a client's growth journey?
We began a partnership with a 20-employee Med-Tech business in early 2020 that had no formal leadership structure and was driven largely by the vision and ambition of the Founder and his early hires. He sensed that they were experiencing the inevitable ‘growing pains’ so he wanted us to help with employee engagement and role clarity.
Fast forward four years, and we partnered with them to design a leadership and succession structure with tangible development and performance metrics to support business growth. Delivered an Organisational Design programme to design each job role in the business to have a unique impact, define new roles needed as the company grew, and develop a strategy that engaged all employees with impacting the operational efficiency of the business. The business scaled to 100 employees and turnover grew from$20M t0 $120M during this period.
The founder was really happy with the key projects delivered, but the impact we’re proud of is the new culture of innovation and collaboration created and how we’ve supported the future leaders for this business to grow and impact the teams around them.
RENCAI Futures is earlier on in its journey, how are you getting on with your mission to impact 10,000 learners per year?
This is interesting as we spent a lot of 2024 learning about the Further Education (FE) and Higher Education Sectors (HE), so it’s been a steep learning curve.
What excites us is to become part of a vibrant community of ‘Education Disruptors’ in the North West. These individuals are passionate about making change in their way and are engaged with the data-driven development solutions we are developing to benefit students and educators development outcomes.
Our first pilot programme has launched with a GM college. We’re working with leadership teams, educators, and 300+ students across Apprenticeship and T-Level programmes to innovate how they learn in the education context and, importantly, how they understand and prepare for their first professional role.
We’ve had great feedback from the group that started this journey. This one college has 10,000 students, and there are currently 70,000 students in Further education across the nine GM colleges, supporting 10,000 businesses. So, the opportunity to scale our impact in Greater Manchester alone is exciting.
You're based in Manchester, known for its vibrant tech and digital community. How does being part of this ecosystem influence your work and collaborations?
I’ve lived in Manchester since I graduated from university, and I love the ‘We’ll do it our way’ mentality with the often-infamous Mancunian swagger!
I see the rapidly growing Tech and digital ecosystem as a modern evolution of that, with a point to prove against the other more established tech hubs Globally.
After living in London and internationally for periods and then returning to Manchester, RENCAI is very much here to support those local businesses and make an impact on a Global platform.
If you could pick one principal thing you hope to gain from this community, what would it be, and why?
For RENCAI Futures to deliver our mission of impacting 10,000 learners a year, we must partner with businesses in the North West, keen to invest in young professionals to accelerate their business growth ambitions.
We know there are some great businesses of all sizes in the MD community, so we’d love to speak to those interested in piloting programmes where we use data-driven individual and team impact solutions to accelerate the impact this future talent has on their companies.
Thank you Matt! Learn more about RENCAI here.
