| Enterprise Evangelist | Enterprise Coach |
| Entrepreneurship is a good thing – you should try it. | Entrepreneurship is neither good not bad. For some people it is a wonderful life affirming experience. For others an unmitigated disaster. |
| We can turn your ideas and dreams into reality. | You can make progress in getting the kind of life that you want. My sole purpose is to offer you the help and support that you need on your journey. |
| We need to increase the start up rate if we are to change the enterprise culture in this community. | We need to help more people believe that they can take action to make things better -in whatever ways matter to them. |
| We encourage people to start business quickly. That helps us to keep up with our contract outputs – and anyway you don’t really learn about business until you are in it – do you? | We help clients start business slowly, if at all. We make sure that they have done as much planning, research and training as possible before they start and got a strong management team in place to reduce the risks of failure. If they have an alternative to starting a small business we encourage them to consider it – SERIOUSLY! We understand just how hard small business can be. |
| We spend a lot of money on publicity and events to attract large numbers (we wish!) to use the service. | We spend almost nothing on publicity. Instead we focus on building a great reputation (we know how to do this) and then encourage word of mouth strategies, referrals and clients telling their stories to gradually build interest. |
| We usually start with a bang – but numbers quickly tail off – unless we keep the marketing spend up. We refer clients into mainstream business support or other sources of support as soon as we can. Our job is just to get them engaged. | We start slowly and build exponentially as our reputation spreads. Within 12 months we would expect top be seeing 200 people a year with about 10% of them going on to start a new business. Because of our reputation we also get some existing business wanting to talk with us – but that is ok because we know how to help them too! |
| We do all we can to keep people engaged with our service. We pay bus fares, pick them up in our cars, provide child care and food to make it easy. | We do little to keep people using the service – other than help them build their confidence and self belief in what they can achieve when they work with us. |
| We don’t mention business failure rates. If we start enough – surely some of them will survive? | We monitor survival rates more closely than start up rates. We understand that it is business failures that establish a fear of enterprise and do most to damage an enterprise culture. |
| We design and deliver our services and interventions to deliver policy goals for number of interventions and start-ups | We design and deliver our services with the client needs at the centre of things. Our service is free of charge, competent, compassionate and easy to access. |
| We believe that primarily our clients need help to develop their ideas from a technical point of view. It is all about the business plan. The sooner we can refer them onto a technical expert – such as a business adviser the better. | We believe that the idea and the business plan is one small aspect of our work. More important is helping the client to develop their skills and their passion and commitment towards making real progress in their lives. Understanding psychology is just as important as understanding business. We develop the people – so that if they want they can develop their business ideas. |
| I don’t need to build a strong relationship – I just need to find people and refer them to mainstream business advisers. | It is the quality of my relationship with you that dictates how useful it is. |