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Maria Duddin

Based in Newcastle upon Tyne, Maria is a keen live music fan, enjoys fitness, the great outdoors, and travel. Maria has vast experience from her national and global commercial and operational leadership roles across tech, ecommerce, digital marketing, premium F&B, hospitality and retail.

Commercially leading businesses and teams at all levels of their growth journey, Maria has worked with startups, SMEs, mid-market and enterprise organisations. You can make an appointment with Maria to understand how the business support ecosystem can help you achieve your growth ambitions.

HomeBusiness support advisersMaria Duddin

Introductions

I’ve been fortunate to work alongside many leading entrepreneurs, providing me with a unique insight into how businesses navigate growth, cut through the noise, create the right roadmap, and establish the critical foundational pillars needed to succeed in highly saturated markets. I have experience building high-performing business development teams to deliver rapid and long-term growth outcomes - building brands, value propositions, and utilising the business support ecosystem / finance landscape. 

I’ve supported incredible businesses here in the North East and globally to build and deliver commercial strategies, profitable outcomes, brand advocacy, penetrating routes to market, high-profile events, international PR and marketing campaigns, and high performing commercial and leadership teams. I want to pivot that experience to add real value to likeminded North East businesses, and ensure they have the knowledge, confidence and access to the wide variety of support available to them, which they may not know exists.

 

Why are good leadership skills so important for business growth?

You’re only as good as the people around you, that’s why it’s so important to lead with vison, empathy and emotional intelligence. If you want to grow a successful business, you have to take people on the journey with you, that’s why building high-performance teams is so important - you’re delivering through others. Having built many teams myself, I can support business owners to adopt the skills and behaviours to make them great leaders - not “managers”.

Why should North East businesses engage with a Business Support Adviser?

The newly formed North East Combined Authority provides a huge opportunity for anyone growing or considering to grow a business in the North East.  As Business Support Advisers, we’re here to make sure entrepreneurs and business owners can unlock the range of support available to them across all areas – whether that’s branding, net zero, digital marketing, leadership, R&D, apprenticeships, developing people, training and retention, or access to finance and funding. The North East Growth Hub is the easiest gateway to the infinite national and homegrown business support ecosystem.

I want to support businesses to remove that fear of failure, take the next step on a business model they believe in, and support people to grasp the opportunity in front of them by unlocking the ecosystem of business support.