A Gloucestershire founder who left teaching to establish a mentoring service has launched a digital wellbeing platform that is in trials with four EFL clubs, after the government-funded Help to Grow: Management Course challenged him to think about how his business could scale.
SaferIn, founded by Chris Powell, gives organisations responsible for large numbers of vulnerable young people a way of seeing who is struggling before any issues arise. Its first market is football academies, where player care managers are responsible for supporting the wellbeing and welfare of academy players. In some academies, a single player care manager can be responsible for more than 120 young players.
The platform is currently being trialled at four clubs, with results due to be presented to the EFL later this year. Within twenty minutes of the first club going live, the platform flagged a young player in difficulty, allowing the club's player care team to put support in place the same day.
Chris developed the platform after more than a decade running Bespoke Mentoring, a company he set up after leaving his role in the education sector. As a school improvement partner working in schools in special measures, he had watched the children at the margins fall outside a system measuring itself on everyone else. Bespoke Mentoring now supports young people aged five to 25 across five counties, working with those referred by local authorities and schools.
Aiming to explore growth opportunities, Chris joined the Help to Grow: Management Course at the University of Gloucestershire Business School in 2024.
Chris Powell, founder of SaferIn and Bespoke Mentoring, commented: “Bespoke Mentoring was never built to be national - it's one mentor and one young person at a time, and that's the point of it. Taking part in the Help to Grow: Management Course allowed me to think about how we could continue doing what we do well at Bespoke while also helping people on a larger scale.
“I actually got the idea for SaferIn in the middle of one of the course sessions and used every session after that to build the business case. The mentoring aspect of the course helped me to understand how SaferIn is different from my original business and work out how I could build it to scale much earlier than I had with Bespoke Mentoring. I honestly don't think SaferIn would exist without that time to stop, reflect and create.”
Before building the platform, Chris gathered insight from 30 former professional footballers, including internationals and long-serving Premier League players, on their experiences of safety and support during their careers. Strikingly, just one of that group saw themselves as having any part to play in managing their own safety, with several describing having no way to raise concerns even when they knew something was wrong.
Chris continued: “When we spoke to people who played at the highest level, it was clear that ownership of their own safety was never on their radar, simply because nobody had ever built the system to include them.
“SaferIn is designed to change that – young players check in daily on how they're doing, and the people responsible for them can see who needs support immediately, not after something has gone wrong.”
Following the trials, it is expected that participating clubs will support the presentation of its impact to all other EFL clubs at their annual North and South Conferences, scheduled for next April.
It isn’t just SaferIn that benefitted from Chris’ attendance on the course. In the eighteen months since hecompleted the programme, Bespoke Mentoring has grown from five staff to nearly 40, tripling in size financially. Chris was supported throughout the course by his Help to Grow: Management mentor Tanya Petherick, who he continues to work with as SaferIn grows.
Flora Hamilton, Executive Director of the Small Business Charter which delivers the Help to Grow: Management Course, adds: “Chris' story captures something we see again and again on the course - a founder who has built a business through sheer purpose, given the space to step back and ask what it could become. He arrived running a mentoring company helping one young person at a time, and left building a platform with the potential to reach every academy player in professional football.
“What makes his story remarkable is that he developed the SaferIn business case live in the sessions, with the support of his mentor and a peer network of fellow business owners; that's exactly what the course is for. We're proud the course played its part in the creation of this exciting enterprise, and we'll be watching SaferIn's next chapter closely.”
The Help to Grow: Management Course is a 90% government-funded leadership programme for SME businesses, delivered by a network of Small Business Charter accredited business schools. The course runs over 12 weeks and includes online and face-to-face sessions, 10 hours of 1-to-1 mentoring and peer networking. Its mission is to increase economic growth and productivity through improved management and leadership practice.
Find out more about the Help to Grow: Management Course here.
About Help to Grow: Management:
Help to Grow: Management is a 12-week course designed to support business leaders and their senior managers to increase resilience, innovation, and growth within their organisations.
Developed and delivered by the network of Small Business Charter accredited business schools, the course is available in more than 60 locations across the UK and is 90% government funded. It is designed to fit around existing work and personal commitments, providing business leaders with more than 50 hours of online and in person training including 10 hours of one-to-one mentoring. Individuals completing the course automatically join the Alumni Network, where they have access to exclusive events, content and partner offers, as well as the support of a UK-wide peer network.
The Small Business Charter (SBC) empowers small business success through its network of expert business schools. Developed 10 years ago by Lord Young, the previous Department for Business, and the Chartered Association of Business Schools, the SBC was established to signpost entrepreneurs, small businesses, and local economic stakeholders to business schools in their region with the expertise to help them thrive. There are 67 SBC accredited business school centres of excellence across the UK which are trusted partners of local stakeholders and the national government to deliver effective leadership and productivity programmes and small business support to drive economic growth.