Gavin Dow
Gavin Dow, Coffee Central Roasting Co. Managing Director, received his Executive MBA in 2020, after four years of part-time study alongside running his wholesale coffee roasting business.
After more than a decade of building and growing his company, he decided to enrol at Nottingham University Business School in order to expand his business knowledge and help to keep pace with a rapidly growing industry.
“Whilst certainly proving to be a challenging experience, my MBA has provided me with the skills and knowledge to speak confidently about a wide range of business topics with professionals from all walks of life”, he said.
“The industry my firm operates in has experienced a fivefold increase in competition over the last seven years and the Nottingham MBA has taught me how to deal with this changing competitive landscape in the most effective manner.”
It didn’t take long for him to see the benefits of his studies come through in his business - Gavin credits the first module he took on the course with saving his company tens of thousands of pounds a year.
Running my own company has afforded me the luxury of being able to implement many of the things taught to me on my MBA, and I can sincerely say the results have been significant.
“One of the assignments from the Operations Management module – the first one I took - was to analyse a business system using the service design and delivery framework", he explained. "Naturally I used my own company to do this. The results demonstrated that I could redesign my firm's approach to a customer's routine and emergency maintenance in a way that doubled the amount of work a single engineer could carry out in any given amount of time.
I've always been very reluctant to make people redundant but after an engineer left for alternative employment, I decided to implement my findings and not replace him. The results were as expected and saved my firm (at the very least) £36,000 in a year - much more than the entire cost of the MBA.”
