Leadership Coaching & Mentoring for Industrial Businesses

Most coaching aimed at manufacturing has never been near a factory. It turns up with a model, a set of cards and a vocabulary that doesn't survive contact with a shift handover.

This is different work. Coaching and mentoring for the people who run industrial businesses, delivered by someone who has stood on the floor at six in the morning with the line down and a customer waiting on an answer.

It sits alongside the health and safety and ISO work rather than apart from it, because in practice the same root cause tends to produce both problems. A safety system nobody follows and a middle manager who was never taught to hold a difficult conversation are the same issue wearing different clothes.

Who this is for

Owner-managers and MDs of manufacturers, logistics operators and industrial engineering firms, typically £10m to £100m turnover, who have hit one of these:

• Growth. The business has outgrown the way it was run at half the size, and the leadership team hasn't caught up.
• Succession. Someone is being prepared to take over, or the founder wants to step back without the business stalling.
• Post-acquisition. Two cultures now share one balance sheet and nobody has said out loud how they differ.
• A deliberate choice to build capability instead of headcount. You would rather make the six managers you have better than hire a seventh.

The buyer is nearly always the MD or owner. Occasionally an operations director sponsoring development for the people below them.

Leadership coaching for MDs and ops directors

One to one, confidential, monthly or fortnightly. It isn't a course and there is no workbook.

The agenda comes from what is actually in front of you: the decision you have been circling for three months, the director who isn't performing, the board conversation you are quietly dreading, the strategy that reads well and isn't happening. We work on that, and on the habits underneath it that keep producing the same situation.

Owner-managers get a particular version of this. You built the thing. Every problem eventually lands on your desk because that is how it has always worked, and now that is the ceiling. Getting past it has less to do with time management than with deciding what you are genuinely willing to let other people do badly for a while.

Operational management mentoring

The most common capability gap in an industrial business sits in the middle. Supervisors and managers promoted because they were the best operator, then given no training in how to manage people.

They know the process inside out. Nobody has shown them how to run a decent one-to-one, how to hold someone to a standard without losing them, how to plan a week rather than react to it, or how to escalate properly. So they cover by doing the work themselves, and the team stays exactly as capable as it was.

Mentoring here is practical and site-based. Real situations from their week, worked through, then followed up. It pairs well with a structured training programme where there is a genuine skills gap alongside the confidence one.

HSEQ specialist mentoring

If you employ an in-house health and safety, quality or environmental manager, they are probably the only person in the building who does their job. They have nobody to test a judgement against, nobody to tell them when they are overcooking a risk assessment or missing something entirely, and their CPD is whatever they can find online at the weekend.

This is developmental peer support. A monthly session with someone who has done the role, plus availability when something lands that they haven't seen before. It makes a competent person more competent, and it costs a great deal less than replacing one who left because they were isolated.

It also works as the step down from a fractional HSEQ advisor arrangement once your internal person is genuinely up to speed.

Culture and operational excellence reviews

A structured look at how the business actually runs against how the leadership team believes it runs. The two are never identical, and the distance between them is where the losses live.

It means time on site and conversations at every level rather than only the management team, followed by a written picture of what we found: where decisions really get made, what gets said in the office and not on the floor, which standards are real and which are decorative, and where the operational drag is coming from.

Delivered as an eight to twelve week programme where there is team capability work attached, or as a standalone review. It pairs naturally with a Compliance Health Check if you want the systems and the culture assessed in the same pass.

What this isn't

We don't do transactional HR. No employment law advice, no employee relations casework, no handbooks, no TUPE, no payroll, no recruitment.

That isn't a gap we're awkward about. It's a different profession, and doing it badly alongside coaching would be worse than not doing it at all. Where a client has a real need we refer to specialist partners we trust and make the introduction ourselves.

We are also not a leadership training provider. No standard programme, no certificate at the end, no cohort of twelve in a hotel meeting room.

What it costs

Coaching retainers: £500 to £1,650 a month. Priced on the same ladder as our HSEQ retainers. At £500 you get a monthly one-to-one with support in between. At £1,650 you get weekly to fortnightly contact, or several people, or a leadership team rather than an individual.

Programme-based engagements: £3,000 to £8,000. Fixed scope, fixed fee, usually eight to twelve weeks. Used for team capability work and culture reviews where there is a defined start and finish.

Existing retainer clients often add coaching to their current arrangement rather than running two agreements. It generally works out cheaper, and it means the person coaching your ops director already knows your business.

Why us rather than a coach

Plenty of coaches will beat us at coaching in the abstract. Very few will understand what your Tuesday looks like.

All of this is built on running operations inside industrial businesses and on the QHSE work we do with manufacturers every week. That means the conversation starts at the right level, and the advice takes account of the customer audit in three weeks, the agency labour problem and the machine that keeps going down.

Where we work

Greater Manchester and the North West in person: Manchester, Bolton, Bury, Stockport, Rochdale, Oldham, Preston, Blackburn, Warrington and Altrincham. See all areas we cover. Coaching sessions elsewhere in the UK run remotely between site visits.

Start with a conversation

The first conversation costs nothing and commits you to nothing. If it isn't the right fit we'll say so, and if what you actually need is an HR specialist or a training provider we'll point you at one.

Get in touch · Fractional HSEQ Advisor · Compliance Health Check