For many business owners, growth is treated as something you push harder towards. More clients, more sales, more output. What is talked about far less is the moment when you realise that pushing harder may not be the answer.
For Gareth Taylor, founder of Swindon-based IT services business Inception, that realisation came after more than two decades of running his own company.
“I’d been talking about wanting to grow the business for years,” he says. “But after 20 years, you reach a point where you realise you know how to run what you’ve got, not necessarily how to grow it beyond that.”
Inception has been part of Swindon’s business landscape for 21 years. From early days in the Bentley Centre, through Berkley House, to its current base on the South Marston Industrial Estate, the company has grown from a cold start into a business turning over more than £1 million and employing around 20 people locally.
From the outside, things looked stable. Internally, Gareth felt something else.
“There’s that saying, you don’t know what you don’t know,” he says. “And that becomes a real challenge when you’ve been doing something for a long time.”
Despite running a successful business, Gareth admits he carried quiet doubts about whether formal leadership education was even for him. He does not have a degree or postgraduate qualifications, his experience has been built through decades in the industry.
“There’s a mental barrier people put up,” he says. “You ask yourself, am I good enough for this? Can I actually take value from it?”
It was his wife, an alumna of the University of Bath, who first encouraged him to look at their government-subsidised Help to Grow: Management programme. His initial instinct was to dismiss it.
“I thought, hang on, I’m not from an academic background,” he says. “But I applied, had the interview, and they told me I was exactly the kind of person the course was designed for.”
That moment alone shifted something.
Delivered by the University of Bath, the 12-week Help to Grow programme brings together business owners and senior leaders to step back from day-to-day firefighting and look properly at how their organisations are structured, led and prepared for growth.
For Gareth, one of the biggest surprises was not the teaching, but the people.
“The cohort don’t know your business, and that’s actually a strength,” he says. “They’re not emotionally tied to it. They can see the obvious things you’ve stopped seeing.”
He describes the experience of meeting other business owners as quietly reassuring.
“We all present the glossy 10 percent,” he says. “The LinkedIn version. What you don’t see is the 90 percent under the water, the messy bit. Being in a room where people are honest about that is powerful.”
That honesty led to a shift in how Gareth thought about growth itself. Instead of asking how to get bigger, he began asking whether the business was ready to grow at all.
“It’s easy to win new customers,” he says. “What’s harder is making sure your systems, processes and people can cope when that growth arrives.”
The course pushed him to examine everything from internal workflows to technology, from leadership structures to team wellbeing. It also forced him to confront uncomfortable truths about burnout, both his own and that of the people around him.
“There have been times in the past where growth has actually put pressure on the team,” he admits. “That’s not fair on people. Planning properly matters.”
On a personal level, Gareth says the biggest takeaway surprised him.
“I came away realising that actually, I am enough,” he says. “That the experience I’ve built over 20 years has real value.”
He is also candid about the role the government subsidy played.
“I would not have done the course if it wasn’t subsidised to such a significant amount,” he says. “That made it accessible.”
When asked to sum it up simply, Gareth does not talk about qualifications or frameworks.
“You don’t know what you don’t know,” he says. “This gives you 12 weeks to realise that, and to start doing something about it.”
As many Swindon business owners head into the new year reflecting on what comes next, Gareth believes the hardest part is giving yourself permission to stop.
“Sometimes you have to step away from what you’re doing to see the picture more clearly,” he says.
The next cohort of the Help to Grow: Management programme, delivered by the University of Bath, runs from 8th January to 26th March, with places still available for eligible business leaders.
