Manchester has never been short of ambition. Walk through the Northern Quarter, sit in on a pitch event in Spinningfields, or speak to someone running a family business in Salford — the drive to grow is everywhere. But wanting to grow and actually doing it in a structured, sustainable way are two very different things. A lot of businesses hit a wall not because the market dried up or the product stopped working, but because there was no real plan holding everything together.

Running a business is hard. That probably sounds obvious, but it's worth saying out loud because a lot of people spend a lot of time pretending it isn't. You've got customers to look after, staff to manage, bills to pay, and somewhere in the middle of all that, you're supposed to be thinking about growth and strategy and where the business is heading in the next five years. It's genuinely a lot to carry. What makes it harder is that most business owners are doing it without m