“Access to genuinely expert advice from mentors is a service that is scarce.”

Marka is the first sustainability rating built for the drinks industry — a B2B SaaS measuring the practices behind the brands. Like every early-stage platform business, they reached a point where the gap between what they could ship and what they could trust was widening. The fix was not more features; it was the maturity layer underneath them.

Through Unlocked Expertise they were matched with Dave Sharp, a mentor with directly transferable experience on the security, data protection and policy creation challenges B2B SaaS platforms face at their stage. Six hours of mentoring, delivered as digestible actions and clear awareness of where the work still needed to happen.

In Rob Bowey’s words: “The support from Dave our mentor was brilliant, really knowledgeable and digestible — both in actions to take and raising awareness of areas that we need to work on. This is knowledge that would be extremely difficult for us to access elsewhere, especially given our current stage of business. As a B2B SaaS platform this knowledge has been a vital piece of the puzzle in helping us scale our product and go to market effectively.”

When asked whether Marka would invest their own funds in further mentoring after the programme support concluded, the answer was unequivocal: “Yes, we’d 100% consider investing our own funds in further mentoring.”