Resolve Gets Results

Mark Ashton - Founder

Resolving your toughest ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ business issues.

You: an executive, business owner or team with pressing problems or challenges.

Your business: startup (funded), scaleup, other SME or mid-sized in a STEM sector – Scientific, Tech (Digital), Engineering or Manufacturing. Or a corporate with a challenge requiring emotional intelligence, innovation, systemic thinking and/or troubleshooting.

We’re a strong international community of experienced senior leaders and managers founded in the North of England, the home of the Industrial Revolution. Northern creativity, grit, honesty, humour and pragmatism define our culture.

Let us be your best business decision – contact us today for an exploratory chat.

“Mark believes in and practices everything he says, and much more besides, to achieve
the kind of results that don’t seem possible in the midst of the ‘**** and bullets’ of real
business problems.”

“Without you this company wouldn’t still exist. Even if it did, I wouldn’t still be running
it.”

“We recommend Resolve for any business looking to enhance their offering or add value
for their clients. We plan to be lifelong business partners with them.”

MARK ASHTON

MARK BRINGS PASSION, WARMTH, VISION
AND UNCOMPROMISING VALUES TO THE CHALLENGE OF DEVELOPING GREAT LEADERS, TEAMS AND BUSINESSES.

“I hire you to stop me from making management errors, and to help fix the ones I do make”

Long-term client, multinational corporate

Since leading a high growth business in the USA for 5 years Mark has had 25 years of hands-on, organisational and strategic consulting experience internationally. Since 2018 he has coached and mentored many founders and senior managers of startups and scaleups in Estonia, the Silicon Valley of Europe.

He champions building companies with a compelling purpose beyond profit, an embedded coaching culture, and a sharp focus on what he calls EmployER Wellbeing. These are research-backed ingredients for sustained superb performance in volatile, uncertain, chaotic and ambiguous (VUCA) environments.

Mark brings powerful disruptive thinking, creativity, passion, vision and uncompromising values to tackle your most difficult business challenges. His trademarks are authenticity, infectious enthusiasm, and care for others.

RESOLVING BUSINESS

Us: Resolvers – outstanding 3-dimensional people with uncompromising values:

1. Great mentors

Each of us has one or more areas of business expertise, in change management, continuous improvement methodologies, employee engagement, finance, market research, marketing, operations, sales or strategy

2. Great coaches

Passionate about developing other people to their full business potential and enjoyment of life. [TRADE SECRET – coaching is the one of the best feelings and personal learning vehicles our team have ever experienced – we love it!]

3. Great leaders

Experienced at senior level. We’ve owned, led, managed and/or advised businesses for many years. We’ve “got the T-shirts” and the “scars on our backs”. We’ve discovered the hard way what works and what doesn’t.

We’re passionate about helping businesses who have the potential to join the elite Top 10% or even Top 1% best long-term performers. We know how they do it – the specific principles they follow. They thrive on adversity, by the way. The tougher it gets, the more clear blue water they put between themselves and their competition. They don’t complain – they adapt and innovate. They treat bad luck as an opportunity.

After careful evaluation of you and your business we provide you with one or more Resolvers most suited to your situation, challenges, and opportunities. They work with you on a commercial and time basis which you control. It may be advisory, coaching, fractional management, fundraising, interim management, mentoring, or project based. In agreement with you, Resolvers may bring in other experts with relevant expertise from the Resolving community to address specific challenges or needs.

RESOLVING EXPORT

EXPORT COACHING AND SUPPORT FOR PURPOSE-DRIVEN BUSINESSES WITH GLOBAL GROWTH POTENTIAL.

In partnership with GEN (Global Entrepreneurship Network) UK we provide an online export accelerator called xporter to overcome the main challenges which inhibit companies from starting to export, and which limit their export growth once they have decided to. To learn more or to apply for xporter, go to xporter – Applications Open – WorldLabs

We help leaders and teams to create solid foundations for sustainable export businesses. This requires a clear vision, evidence-based strategy, and willingness to confront the issues that matter:

Overcoming the six major exporting Fears – entrepreneurs, leaders and teams must understand and compensate for their fears and biases, and be able to assess risk rationally and mitigate against it.

Understanding the Power of consumers and regulators in export markets, and how to leverage the strengths of your company’s and your country’s existing reputation. We help businesses to identify and work through which markets to tackle first, the best routes to market, and the supply chain, production, distribution, regulatory and leadership challenges which have to be overcome.

Positioning yourself and/or your business as an Authority (expert) in your chosen niche. This niche may differ from one market to another.

Ensuring that you can operate with Legitimacy by working with local accountants, lawyers, customs experts etc. to be fully compliant with legislation in your chosen export markets.

Creating and successfully delivering a powerful Vision for your thriving export business, which contains uncompromising values and principles, a compelling purpose beyond profit, and a clear, timebound mission (what you plan to achieve by when).

We ensure that you have a robust and scalable international business plan and strategy which can be delivered. We fill the gaps in your export capability, make relevant in-market introductions, and help you to manage your success and embed the lessons learnt into business improvement and further opportunities for growth.

To learn more, please book an exploratory conversation with Mark Ashton.

RESOLVING LEADERSHIP

We offer 121 and team coaching, and leadership development programmes for you and your team. We teach you how to self-coach, and how to coach your team, which you will find hugely satisfying. We can also help to build a coaching culture throughout your company, to steadily improve results.

We offer facilitated peer groups for you and for members of your team, with leaders and opposite numbers from other businesses in similar situations to yours. These groups provide a psychologically safe environment of friendship, mutual support, learning and personal growth. The group sets its own learning agenda, and we can bring in relevant speakers to inspire them.

We are on a mission to transform the understanding and behaviour of leaders in business. This is great for them personally, and for the people they lead.

EmployER Wellbeing

building a powerful coaching culture throughout the
business, starting with you (self-coaching)

Organisational Physiology

creating the organisational DNA for enduring success

Skin

Better outcomes based on continuously improving business fundamentals

Head

Value stream mapping (How and why it works): streams of activity and information, control, timelines, capacity, constraints, agreements, operational assumptions, risks, issues, concerns

Accountability (Who is accountable for what?): Purpose and goals, success criteria, performance indicators, reporting relationships, knowledge management, impact on performance management

Capability (Can we do it?): Do we have the rights skills, knowledge, attitudes, management style?

Heart

Emotion (The unspoken elements): Get questions and doubts into the open, deal with them transparently

Behaviour (What do we do differently?): How do the organisation’s values fit?

Commitment Do all stakeholders believe this is right? What happens when people do not understand or play by the agreed rules?

Soul

Beliefs and values What matters more than anything else to individuals, and to the organisation as a whole?

We are Resolve

Core Team

Elaine Gold

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Elaine Gold

In addition to being an experienced Executive Coach and Mentor, Elaine is Co-Founder and Managing Director of GEN UK, where Elaine focuses on consulting projects, women’s entrepreneurship, leadership and mentoring and Global Entrepreneurship Week in UK. With her 12 years experience in the Global Entrepreneurship Network, Elaine is also an advisor to the GEN Global Board.

Elaine combines her experience and expertise as both consultant and coach with her practical experience of operating at Director level in several organisations. Her clients span across MENA, USA and UK in industries such as start-ups, multi-media, science, professional services, retail, IT, leisure, engineering, government and charity. Elaine’s clients describe her as having ‘ a thorough understanding of strategic organizational development’ and being ‘probing’, ‘intuitive’, ‘insightful’ and ‘unremitting in pursuit of clarity of purpose and the execution of plans to achieve this’.

PAUL MASLIN

Keith Ruddock

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Keith Ruddock

Keith is a senior business leader, interim executive and commercial consultant with more than thirty-five years’ expertise gained successfully delivering large scale transformation strategies and making operational ambitions a practical reality.

Keith has strong cultural change management and cost reduction capabilities. He forges robust strategic partnerships, engages stakeholders, and ensures full executive level buy-in to the delivery of transformative programmes. He is results orientated, with high ethical standards and professional integrity, who has become a trusted and reliable adviser at board level. During the last eight years he has worked collaboratively with multiple SME owners to provide business advice alongside mentoring and coaching support.

Keith is a highly committed member of the Resolve team and acts as its Head of Operations.

Mark Ashton

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Mark Ashton

Mark founded Resolve in 2006 after 20 years in business leadership, consulting, sales, and technology transfer in the UK/Europe and North America.

After graduating in Engineering from Cambridge University in 1984 he worked in North-East England for seven years before moving to North Carolina, where he spent five years growing the US subsidiary of a UK textile machinery manufacturer from $6 million to $20 million.

Since 1997 he has used creative thinking, first principles, strategic insights and verifiable external research data as a strategic business consultant, to solve the toughest problems which stop scientific, technology, engineering and manufacturing companies from achieving sustained great results and positive impact on the wider community.

In 2018 Mark joined the .Cocoon coaching/mentoring programme for startups and scaleups founded by a leading investor in Estonia, the Silicon Valley of Northern Europe. He is one of .Cocoon’s most in-demand mentors and is also a coach with Superangel, an investor and business accelerator backed by the founders of some of Estonia’s most successful tech companies.

To the challenge of developing outstanding businesses, leaders and teams, Mark brings humour, passion, warmth, vision, and uncompromising values. He is great fun to work with.

Vijaykumar Venkatramani

Ph.D

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Vijaykumar Venkatramani

Scientist | Psycho-Spiritualist | Enneagram Coach | Service Leader

After an early career in science in India and North America, Vijay has spent the last twenty-four years researching the Enneagram and other systems to develop a beautiful method by which to transform individuals and organisations. He currently teaches the Enneagram to interested clients and is working to popularise it in India.

He is Resolve’s first team member and business developer in India.