Harry Young
“Seeing the impact of my MBA on the business has been really satisfying.”
Ask a Bayes MBA student their motivation for taking the programme and you will get a variety of responses. For some, it is about progressing to a senior leadership role in their existing company. For others, it is to completely change direction in their career, or to build their own start-up. For Harry Young, undertaking the Modular Executive MBA was an opportunity to steer his company towards global expansion.
“Pretty much from day one of the MBA, I was thinking ‘What’s the lever we can pull that’s going to have the biggest impact on the business and my role in finance?’ Being in a small company and in a position of seniority meant that I could actively affect the decisions that we made as a business.”
Harry is Finance Director at design agency Squint/Opera. He trained as an accountant, initially working in practice at Deloitte.
“The majority of the first seven years of my career were very finance-focused, providing professional services to a broad range of clients. Some of them were big multinationals, but some were very small, and others were charities. Working with the smaller companies I found that you were involved in everything. It's much more interesting - you weren't pigeonholed to one role and just doing the same thing over and over again.”
When he left Deloitte, Harry made a conscious choice to look for start-ups he could work with.
“I'd had a sabbatical at Deloitte and worked in a couple of start-ups as a contractor and I really liked it. I joined Squint/Opera in April 2019, and I was brought in because of my Deloitte background to help get the business ready for audit.”
Choosing Bayes for his MBA
“I decided to do the MBA because I knew it would open doors for me – it’s something that you have on your CV that makes people stand up and pay attention. I also had a colleague who had completed her MBA at Bayes and I was really impressed at her breadth of knowledge and the way she could talk across the different functions of the business, seemingly at ease. I asked her how she did this, and she credited the MBA with a lot of her knowledge.”
“Bayes has a great reputation and ranks highly in league tables. I was self-funded so price was a deciding factor too. I think the combination of those different factors meant that I knew Bayes was the right fit for me.”
Harry enrolled on the two-year part-time Modular Executive MBA in 2022. The structure of the programme involves one long weekend of intense study per month, allowing students to balance their studies with work and personal commitments. The blended format is taught from a Friday to Sunday on campus in London, with additional online learning.
Juggling work, home-life and study
Adjusting to a new routine and the demands of the MBA was initially trickier than Harry had expected.
“It was harder than I thought it would be – it’s the cadence of it. Four days at work and then four days of intense study. Then you have coursework to do, and you really need to start doing it straight away. It was quite difficult to maintain that pace initially. I was also a new dad – my daughter was six months old when I started the MBA in March 2022. At work we were preparing to be sold to a private equity-backed business - there was a lot going on and it was quite hard for those first six months.”
For Harry, part of the solution was to work smarter.
“I tried as much as possible to make my MBA assignments directly applicable to the business. I’d ask my colleagues for relevant data and then I’d use that as the basis for my assignment write-ups.”
Applying the MBA to the business
“Two modules with real impact were Corporate Strategy and an elective in the second year, The New Strategic Landscape. The core modules on Operations Management and Principles of Marketing were both useful too, but the module with most impact was the elective on Mergers & Acquisitions. I did my Business Project on M&A, considering best practice for targeting searches for small to medium-sized businesses. It was at the time our business was looking for a target to acquire, and that worked really well.”
“I approached Professor Scott Moeller, who is the Director of the M&A Research Centre at Bayes, and started having conversations with him about what form my project should take. He was really good at helping me break down my ideas and be really targeted. He told me not make it too broad, or else it would be meaningless.”
“Those initial conversations were so useful in helping me frame the project and I could work very efficiently on it. I could incorporate learning from the M&A module, and when I submitted sections to him for review, I got rapid feedback, which really helped keep me on track and not go off on tangents doing unnecessary work.”
Getting the buy-in
The founders and other colleagues within Harry’s company were used to him bringing his MBA learnings and assignments back to the business.
“They had already seen the value in it, so they were quite open and receptive to the recommendations in my Business Project. I also interviewed a lot of senior people as part of the project – not just founders, but also two of the private equity owners, as well as CFOs and CEOs from other companies that the private equity firm owns.”
“I think the fact that I was interviewing people already in the network meant that, one, I got really good quality interviewees, but two, the buy-in was already there because I was talking to essentially the owners and the decision makers.”
“Seeing the impact of my MBA on the business has been really satisfying.”
Eye-opening international electives
Harry took two international electives during his MBA: one in Vietnam and the other was the Innovation and Technology Study tour to Israel and Palestine - a trip that proved to be a standout moment of his MBA experience.
Harry Young and two fellow students on the Israel-Palestinian elective module in Israel.
“Growing up in the West, I’ve been watching news about Israel and Palestine my whole life. But actually going there and seeing how geographically small it is, and how built up the cities are, it’s quite an experience. We visited Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Ramallah and they are such beautiful places. Never in my life did I think I’d be there. It really is just an all-around great experience. Even though it is work, it's one of those things that you are very happy to do.”
“What I took away from the start-ups and organisations we visited, was the power of ecosystems and how you can have these hubs of similar businesses. That really is what can turbocharge economic growth at the macro level. When you are in that ecosystem, it's helpful for you to have access to talent because the university education system is close to the hubs.”
“That, for me, was really insightful and powerful because we're a creative agency based in London. Immediately, I could see the parallels - we know who all the other companies are that are similar to us, and we know which universities produce the talent that we want to hire.”
Advice for prospective MBA students
“Tackle problems in pieces and break things down into chunks,” is how Harry summarises his advice to anyone considering the Modular Executive MBA.
“Don’t let yourself get overwhelmed with the volume of work that you need to, or the amount of reading. Just be very strategic and go for quality over quantity. When you do a weekend on the programme, make sure you attack the assignment straight away – focus on getting things done and keeping moving. Also, find space for yourself where you have a focused hour or two of study – for me it was the mornings, because that’s when I found I could work the best.”
“The other thing that really helped me was exercising and trying to be as healthy as possible while you are working hard. Also, it helps you come back to a problem with a fresh perspective, and many times you find the problem resolves itself.”
Broadening horizons
While Harry acquired knowledge that had an immediate impact for his employer, he recognises that the MBA changed him as a person too.
“The MBA broadened my horizons and the way I look at the world, and I’m more considered looking at both sides of an argument. Also, having given two years to the MBA, when you make that sacrifice it makes you more driven to be successful in everything that you do afterwards.”
“I don't want to go back to just doing enough to get by. I want to help my company be successful and then have a story to tell at the end. To be able to look back and say, ‘it was a 10-year journey and look at what we achieved – we’ve become a company that is recognised globally’. That is really powerful.”