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After Business Link…Time for a change of tack?

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So it was confirmed in the White Paper yesterday that Business Links will be gone by the end 2012.  All that will remain is a website, and perhaps a call centre.

So what will replace £154m per year of business information, advice and guidance?

Time for DIY support I think.

Time for businesses and the wider communities of which they are a part to help themselves on their own terms.

I am not talking about ‘local’  Chambers of Commerce or Enterprise Agencies winning contracts from the State to deliver outputs and targets in return for tax payers cash.  That will just recreate the problems of the old regime:

  • post code lotteries,
  • sectoral discrimination,
  • services designed to trigger funding payments and hit targets, rather than work in person centred ways to deliver just in time support to the people who are hungriest for it,
  • groupies who learn to lunch with the bureaucrats and help them to deliver the targets while some people who are the most hungry for support are denied it because they are not aiming to turnover £2m within 24 months, live in the wrong part of town, aren’t working in a priority sector and so on.

DIY culture can provide support that is:

  • more accessible,
  • more inclusive,
  • much less expensive and I suspect,
  • much, much more impactful in terms of creating economic, social and political progress than the current system.

Why, because it is convivial, inclusive, centred on people and relationships, not focussed on policy goals and targets, bureaucracy light, puts experts and expertise in the back seat rather than the driving seat (it is great to have them on board when we need them – but much of this stuff we can figure out for ourselves), dynamic and above all fun!

And I would ensure that everyone who wants it, who really wants to work on making progress, should have access to free, confidential and competent coaching, in the community, from a coach who is supported, and held accountable by local people.  This is both practical, sustainable and affordable with the potential for a tremendous return on investment in terms of business, culture, health and well-being, community development, skills development and so forth.

The radical secret to this is that the coach engages with and works on the clients agenda – not the agendas of the planners and policy makers.

Time to take ‘enterprise development’ out of the ghettos of ‘entrepreneurship’ and ‘business support’ and to put it at the heart of our strategies for community development.

Because if we develop the people and the communities then they will build the economy.

I wonder if any of the new Local Enterprise Partnerships will have the courage, foresight and leadership to give it a go?

Enterprise Show 2010

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Enterprise Show Poster in Leeds

Enterprise Show is on its way to town again.

Wasn’t it this couple, on this setee who featured in last years adverts for the Enterprise Show?

I wonder if they will ever start….

And  ‘We’ve got all you need to know in ONE day‘ ….

You show me an entrepreneur who says they learned all they need to know in ONE DAY and I will show you a liar.

Now where is that number for advertising standards…

Why IDB is Not So Smart…

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Business Link is built around a proposition called IDB.  Inform, Diagnose and Broker.

Providing access to information, diagnosing problems, and brokering in people who can provide relevant specialist help.

As well as facing some tricky practical problems (making brokerage effective and impartial being just one) there are more significant problems with this approach.  It focuses on problems and weaknesses and assumes that these can best be managed by introducing the owner manager, or the management team, to an external consultant with specialist knowhow.

In spite of some very practical problems in making this work (has anyone got a brokerage platform that really works yet, or a methodology for diagnosing that is used consistently, objectively and effectively by all brokers?); the main problem is the occasional failure to get to the nub of the issue –  the make up of the entrepreneurial team and the managerial imbalance that, more often than not, is the root cause of the problem.

If a business is struggling with some aspect of its development, this is a clue that there maybe a weakness in the management team in that area.  It maybe a lack of knowledge.  Or a lack of passion for the specific activity.  It maybe that the knowledge and passion was never present in the management team (we don’t do enough to help entrepreneurs build a robust management team before they start up).  Or it may have just been lost over time as one, or more,  of the management team becomes complacent or jaded.   More often than not the underlying problem is in the current competence and passion of the owner manager or management team.  But this gets overlooked in our rush to broker in a solution.

A specialist is brokered in and the problem addressed.  Temporarily.  Often with limited success.

Why?

Because of the nature of the underlying problem.  There is no-one in the management team who really cares about this aspect of the business who has the passion and the tenacity to implement the recommendations of the specialists.  Giving marketing advice to someone who is not passionate about marketing is unlikely to lead to a roaring success.

The client often does not need brokering to a supplier of a one-off specialist solution.  They need to be helped to confront the structural weaknesses in their management team that allowed the problem to arise or the opportunity to slip by.