NEWS

By Craig Huntingdon, Scaleup Partner, RTC North

From experience, I understand that commercial growth rarely follows the smooth trajectory often apparent to the casual observer. Within the business, the greatest challenge is rarely ambition itself; it’s instead the moment a leadership team must make an unfamiliar kind of decision, maybe at a pace not previously achieved and with significantly more risk than before. That is precisely where my role begins.

As a Scaleup Partner, I work alongside founders and leaders who are ready to grow but want someone in the room who has navigated similar terrain: someone able to ask the difficult questions, make the right introductions and help them trust their own judgement at a critical moment.

Periods of transition expose a business in ways that periods of stability do not. New funding, new contracts, new markets and new operating models all test a leadership team's mindset and assumptions. It is in these moments that the presence of someone with genuine, lived experience of scaling a business becomes invaluable.

An experienced partner does not simply offer theory or AI-generated playbooks; they bring pattern recognition built from having faced comparable inflection points themselves: the funding round that nearly fell through, the hire that came a quarter too late, the contract win that demanded an entirely different commercial model overnight. That perspective allows a leadership team to anticipate problems rather than merely react to them and to make bold decisions with greater confidence because those decisions have been shared, considered and sense-checked by an experienced and neutral ally.

Just as importantly, this kind of partnership is built on trust rather than transaction. The value is not in being told what to do, but in having someone walk alongside the business, honestly and without an agenda, who can hold up a mirror at the moments that matter most. That combination of experience and impartiality is what allows leadership teams to move through periods of significant change with clarity rather than guesswork.

This year I worked with Paul Slaughter and the team at Care Messenger, a North East company built around a simple yet powerful idea: that elderly people should be able to stay connected with the people who matter most to them, using technology they already understand. In partnership with LG, the team developed a TV-based video calling platform operated through a standard remote control.

The opportunity in front of Care Messenger was substantial, and so was the complexity it carried. Major contract wins required the business to scale from a lean team into an organisation delivering across multiple locations in two countries, from South Lanarkshire to a leading care provider in the Netherlands. That kind of growth demands a different calibre of thinking. Together, we focused on the foundations: resourcing plans, funding strategy, the investor narrative and the operational infrastructure required to deliver at pace once contracts landed. Care Messenger has since achieved successful rollouts in two countries, with a platform that has the potential to grow well beyond its original scope.

Care Messenger is just one of 728 businesses RTC supported to grow this year, many through the Scaleup North East programme where similar success stories are observed. iPac Packaging Innovations, a Gateshead manufacturer, worked with my colleague, Tony Brooks and is now investing £10 million over 18 months and creating around 15 new jobs. Aubin at Baobab Logix secured places on the Microsoft for Startups, NVIDIA Inception and AWS programmes, unlocking resources worth over a million pounds.

What connects these businesses is not sector or scale; it is the point at which each needed someone to think alongside them, honestly and openly. All partners have built and sold businesses ourselves, raised investment and, as importantly, had our fair share of challenge and failure. So when insight is shared or support is shared, it comes from direct experience and a desire to see regional businesses thrive.

Their success is what drives us, and I am proud of the part we played in it this year.

You can read the full Care Messenger story, and more from across the year, in our 2025/26 Annual Review.