Stuart Pringle

Founder

I have a habit of noticing when businesses are leaving money on the table with their sales and marketing approach. After nearly 20 years in B2B sales, I can smell BS from 50 meters away – which turns out to be a surprisingly useful superpower when helping founders cut through the noise.

As Managing Director of Make the Break, I started working freelance in 2018 supporting Empire Engineering, then incorporated the business in 2020. What began as a one-person startup idea has grown into a team of five, working with brands across the renewables spectrum. Our clients aren’t just growing – they’re becoming more profitable, winning awards, and even getting acquired.

My journey here wasn’t entirely linear. I cut my teeth in new business sales and worked my way up through a number of B2B media agencies before building out marketing expertise, eventually running teams at Media and Publishing group, Sift where we won and retained accounts like Microsoft, Zendesk, and Salesforce while growing our marketing agency side to over 400 retained accounts. Now I run my own SME and live in the same world as our founder clients, which means I genuinely understand the challenges they face – and I’m naturally wired to bring lots of ideas and push them to do things they wouldn’t tackle on their own.

I take my work seriously but don’t take myself too seriously – and I have an oddly reliable memory for remembering where people work and where they used to work. I’m also a bit of a self-confessed CRM geek. Having worked with most of the players in the game, I’ll happily go toe to toe with anyone on a customer data conversation.

Working in renewables changed everything for me. Suddenly the mix of people, passion and purpose came together.

When I’m not helping founders crack their go-to-market challenges, you’ll find me chasing my two boys, Fergus and Dougie, around Bristol. And if I could escape entirely, I’d be up a mountain on skis, staying in some remote mountain refuge.