Mark Ritson and Tim Plyming on 10 years of the MiniMBA

Ten years ago, Mark Ritson identified a problem most business schools were unwilling or unable to solve: marketers were falling behind on the fundamentals of their own discipline, and the traditional MBA, with its two years, six-figure fees and full-time study, was neither accessible nor designed for how marketing actually needs to be learned. His answer was the MiniMBA: a rigorous, MBA-level marketing education delivered in a fraction of the time and cost, built to fit around a working life rather than replace it.

A decade on, that answer has scaled into one of marketing training's genuine success stories. Nearly 50,000 marketers across 60 countries have now completed the programme, with alumni from many of the world's leading brands. What began as a single course in marketing has grown into a suite spanning brand management and senior leadership, and, since joining the Brave Bison ecosystem a year ago, into a business increasingly focused on large enterprise accounts, including a seven-figure agreement to train 1,500 marketers at a global FMCG firm and a partnership with Omnicom training over 1200 marketers across Oceania, and growing accounts such as Campari.

To mark the milestone, Cavendish's Andy Renton sat down with Mark Ritson and MiniMBA CEO Tim Plyming to discuss where the idea came from, what has driven a decade of growth, and where the business goes next, from new short-form courses to AI-supported learning built on ten years of Ritson's teaching.

Watch the conversation below.

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