Twenty years in the engine room of SMEs.
Mike has spent his career working inside small and medium-sized businesses as a director and operational leader, not as a consultant parachuted in from the outside. Embedded in leadership teams, making decisions and doing the actual work, across recruitment, franchising, corporate healthcare, medico-legal and logistics.
The pattern he kept seeing was consistent. The founder who started the business on the basis of something they were genuinely brilliant at gradually found themselves spending more and more time on the parts of running a business they were neither built for nor interested in. Operations. People. Strategy. Governance. The harder the business became to run, the less time they had for the thing that created it.
The psychology is not a brand. It is a tool.
An MSc in Psychology from the University of Wolverhampton was not something Mike pursued to differentiate a consultancy. It came from a genuine interest in why organisations behave the way they do, and why the same operational problems keep recurring in businesses that have already fixed the process.
The answer is almost always in the human layer. The culture, the behaviour, the dynamics between people and how they respond to change. That background changes how Mike approaches operational problems. The diagnosis goes beyond the process to the people around it. The work tends to stick because it addresses why things were not working, not just what.
Recruitment as the third dimension.
Most operational and strategic work eventually runs into a people problem. A role that needs filling properly. A team that is not quite right. A culture that is breaking as the business grows. A background that spans both recruitment and organisational psychology means Mike approaches hiring differently. Not just finding the right candidate, but defining what right looks like for a specific stage, culture and set of goals. Then building the people management framework around it.
Three disciplines. One trusted partner.
Brynley Knight was built on the combination of these three things: the strategic and operational depth to build and run businesses, the psychology to understand why they succeed or quietly fall apart, and the recruitment expertise to get the people right. All of it pointed at the same question: what is this founder trying to build, and what do they need to get there?