Mark Ullah launches consultancy gig

Industry veteran Mark Ullah is launching his self-named consultancy gig, leveraging years of experience to help company founders supercharge market growth.  

Ullah said his main focus was to work on business improvement, growth and innovation projects with progressive business leaders.  

Over the last 20 years, Ullah’s expertise has been grounded in business improvement and innovation. With experience in senior leadership roles across both large corporations and smaller enterprises, Ullah has honed an ability to identify and capitalise on growth opportunities that others might overlook. 

“In a world where businesses often struggle with stagnant or negative growth, business leaders require holistic, real-world advice, not theoretical best practice,” he said.  

Ullah’s approach is grounded in real-world pragmatism, something that sets him apart from traditional big four consultants. Having launched, scaled, and managed several businesses himself, Ullah brings a depth of understanding that only stems from experience. 

“My main focus is working with innovative business leaders to improve and hyper scale their business,” he said.  

“I am in there to help them understand how, through leveraging innovation and ‘outside-the-box thinking’, they can differentiate in the market and really scale their businesses.”  

Ullah said his focus was on incremental innovation – whether that’s developing new products or improving existing products; improving business processes or driving better efficiency in their business.  

He also looks at business model innovation, changing the way a company creates and captures value and service innovation analysing what services are provided and if they’re landing well with customers.  

Ullah also focuses on merger and acquisition activity, such as exit planning and getting the business into a commercially sensible shape, along with working with private equity to conduct commercial due diligence to identify areas of untapped value.  

Ullah’s experience, spanning sales, marketing, operations, commercial strategy, and technology, equips him to quickly diagnose challenges and craft tailored strategies that drive efficiency, cut costs, and foster “market-creating” innovations. 

“One of the biggest challenges for business owners is the ability to disrupt themselves,” Ullah said.  

“Products and services are typically under fire from competitors all the time but, because business owners have been successful in the past, it doesn’t mean their products and services are successful in the future; they fail to see, or acknowledge the emerging threat,” he said.   

One of the biggest issues Ullah spies is that owners are typically too focused on revenue and not profitability.  

“A lot of people will have great top line revenue numbers, but their profitability is under five per cent, which means their costs are tracking in line with their revenues which is an unhealthy business,” he said.  

Other big issues include cash flow, technology disruptions, talent management, skills gaps, brand awareness and operational inefficiencies along with declining growth and the inability to innovate on the right things, Ullah added.  

To help improve this, Ullah focuses on a five key areas of innovation: product innovation, process innovation, business model innovation, service innovation and business transaction innovation, as well as collaboration and partnerships, market analysis, strategy and vision.  

“If you’re not pushing, challenging or questioning, then you’re probably stagnant and may be going backwards and just don’t know it. I do respectfully challenge the status quo, but it’s to extract the greatest value for my clients,” Ullah said.