NEWS | TRIO JOIN FORCES AND COMMIT TO GIVING BACK TO SCHOLARSHIP SCHEME

A new company run by three experienced engineers has committed to donating 10% of all profits to the scholarship scheme that its founders benefited from.

GI-3 Growth Partners, run by three Sainsbury Management Fellows (SMFs), is supporting engineering, industrial and manufacturing businesses to increase profitability through performance improvement.

It has been launched by mechanical engineer Chris Shelley (INSEAD), electrical engineer Henning von Spreckelsen (IMD) and chemical engineer Simon Duncan (INSEAD). All three were awarded an SMF scholarship to study for MBAs at the world’s leading business schools in the 1990s.

And recognising the footing the MBA gave them in the business world, the trio have now committed to repaying the faith once shown in them by donating 10% of all Gi-3 profits to the scholarship scheme to help pay for others to follow in their footsteps.

Gi-3 Growth Partners Chief Executive Officer Chris Shelley said: “I’ve known Simon since 1990 when we overlapped in our years taking the MBA at INSEAD. As a group, we regularly get together since we graduated, and I’ve always known him as one of the Sainsbury Management Fellows.

“Henning and Simon have worked together before, and of course I know Henning from the SMF events. We ended up talking just before Christmas and said we should start a business together.

“We worked on a few ideas and within three or four days it was live – and we had our first client eight weeks later.”

The Gi-3 team focus on working with business owners and management to significantly kickstart growth in revenues, improve EBITDA margins and enhance shareholder value, by uniquely contracting to share in the growth in value created.

Chris, Henning and Simon are just three of the 400-strong community of engineers who have been awarded SMF scholarships. Collectively, the group has founded more than 300 companies and created more than 20,000 jobs as they look to enhance the UK economy.

The trio’s commitment to giving back comes on the back of the SMF Step Challenge, which saw former scholarship recipients donate £71,000 towards funding scholarships independently moving forwards.

Chris, a former President of what is now Engineers in Business Fellowship, which runs the scholarship scheme, believes giving back is the right thing to do.

He added: “When we founded GI-3, we were very clear about what we wanted to achieve with it. We have all done really well on the back of our scholarships and have gone onto achieve some amazing things. The MBA and our experiences since mean we have the perfect combination of commercial, financial and technical skills.

“We all decided that we should give something back. It was never really a case of ‘should we?’ but rather ‘how much?’.

“The Sainsbury Management Fellows are a well-respected group of individuals – we will always go to that group first if any one of us need any expertise in a certain field. We’ve built the company around the reputation of the SMF community so it’s important we can leverage that to give back and support the next generation of engineers.

“All three of us are engineers, and we all have MBAs under our belt, but the richness and diversity of our individual skills, relationships and knowledge really serve up a remarkable complementarity for the business world.”

Find out more about how to become a Sainsbury Management Fellow.