Leader community

MD2MD is an diverse international community of Operational business leaders and often Accidental business leaders.

They share a desire to learn with and from real leaders

  • to be even better leaders
  • so their businesses are even more successful,
  • so the economy improves and society benefits
Join us

Operational business leaders

With ten or more staff your challenge is leading more than doing.

With less than a thousand staff you are operational. You make day to day leadership decisions such as what to develop, sell and deliver, how to organise and motivate, and who to hire, develop and fire. Indeed you develop the business plan and deliver against it.

You are responsible for balancing long term investment and short term profit, sales and marketing, operational efficiency and quality and, development and growth.

You’ll be developing and managing people, structures and teams using policies, processes and systems to deliver financial and non financial outcomes.

Accidental business leaders

You have taken on the leadership role almost by accident.  You were good at your specialist discipline of sales, operations, finance ro something else and got promoted. And then promoted again and again until you reached the top of the tree where you are now!

Suddenly you found you were responsible for many activities you’ve have never done before. And everyone is turning to your for the important decisions – and holding you to account for them. The buck stops with you for pursuing the right strategy. And for engaging and enthusing everyone behind it and for making the right decisions.

Being a leader can be tough and whilst you have to display confidence externally, internally you might, occasionally, feel a bit of an imposter.

It can be lonely at the top, especially when you have to make really difficult decisions.

Being part of a MD2MD group and realising all good leaders have similar feelings and concerns is a great way to get more things more right as well as being very reassuring.

To his surprise, as he had an MBA and had always planned to lead a business, our founder discovered when he joined a business leader peer group that he was an exception amongst operational business leaders.  He was only one with an MBA.  He realised most of his fellow leaders were what he called Accidental Business Leaders.  Click below to read his insight into them.

Read an article about accidental business leaders

Leaders learning with and from fellow leaders

Our private peer challenge board meetings are a safe space where you can debate with other real leaders like you practical business challenges, share experience and develop your leadership thinking.

We use the term MD2MD to illustrate that the essence of your membership is your relationships with peers. Engaging with other leaders like you.   We use the term MD for Managing Director but actually your job title may very well be Chief Executive, Executive Chairman, Senior Partner or Managing Partner.

Read more about typical challenges

You will suit MD2MD membership if you

  • Are ambitious for greater business success, and recognise that to achieve that you need to develop your leadership skills to effectively lead the team to deliver more and better
  • Have the humility to recognise that everyone – no matter how brilliant and experienced a leader – can raise their game further
  • Are willing to challenge and be challenged with alternative views, constructive questions and different insights
  • Want to learn from a diverse group of experienced real business leaders
  • Are an operational leader managing profit and loss, and making decisions on priorities and people
Membership Info:

And if your organisation is...

  • Sufficiently established that you succeed mainly by leading effectively rather than doing it yourself.
    Usually this means you lead a team of tens or hundreds and you have revenues from £500k to £50m
  • Growing, or you’ve grown in the past and have the resources to get back to growth
  • Are ambitious to drive greater success (however you define it)
  • Leading a private, public*, or third* sector business or business unit.

Try a meeting - as our guest

If you are an operational business leader ambitious to be an even better leader and deliver even more sustainable and profitable business growth then why not join MD2MD?

See some really great speakers (read about them here) and to meet fellow operational leaders like you in one of our many meeting formats. (See full details here)

Core to MD2MD, and our most unique service, are the confidential business leader peer groups.  Groups that meet regularly to compare experiences, consider challenges, share insights and develop their leadership through practical and pragmatic discussion in private.

It’s difficult to understand how powerful these meetings can be if you’ve not experienced one, so why not try a demonstration meeting as our guest and experience the MD2MD process and ethos for yourself?

Apply to join a demonstration meeting

MD2MD is for operational business leaders that:

regularly make decisions worth £10k – £100k and sometimes make decisions worth £1M+.

if MD2MD can help them make just one better decision occasionally there will be a return on investment in membership

manage an annual salary bill of £500k to £50M

if MD2MD can help them engage their team just 1% more effectively then then there will be a return on investment in membership

are responsible for developing and delivering strategy.  For ensuring the business is offering the right products and services to the right market through the right channels at the right time!

if MD2MD can help them get their strategy more right more often then there will be a return on investment in membership

More about the value of MD2MD membership