Claire West’s article Dragons’ Den Entrepreneur Doug Richard Wants To Replace Business Link shows how Doug has rattled a few cages! (I was running a great programme foe Business Link London yesterday, as it happens!)
Doug described the current system, which involves over 3,000 different schemes run by 2,000 public bodies and their contractors, as "confusing and out of control".
Around two-thirds of the £2.5 billion spent on the system goes on telling companies where to find advice.
Doug described the current system, which involves over 3,000 different schemes run by 2,000 public bodies and their contractors, as "confusing and out of control".
Around two-thirds of the £2.5 billion spent on the system goes on telling companies where to find advice.
Doug laid out a number of recommendations to improve the support given to businesses, including:
- Creating a single, national, web-based Business Information System
- Improving access to finance for SME's
- Helping small businesses secure more Government contracts
- Overhauling enterprise education in schools.
- Creating a single, national, web-based Business Information System
- Improving access to finance for SME's
- Helping small businesses secure more Government contracts
- Overhauling enterprise education in schools.
This full-frontal attack on the Business Link movement gives the BL a great opportunity to strike back and prove what great value they offer. Let’s see how their PR machine gets into gear.
Anyone who knows me will know how I bang on about cost per delegate or customer acquisition cost etc. So, doing the numbers on the BL…
£2.5 billion split between 4 million businesses equates to £625 per business. But... BL claim that they have reached 10% of the 4 million businesses which suggests that BL has spent £6,250 accessing/working with each of those 400,000 businesses. And 2/3rds is spend on signposting.
The questions are:
- Is this good value for money?
- Is there a more effective way to distribute the money?
- Is there a better way of stimulating the UK economy?
4 comments:
I read, and enjoyed The Richard Report (?) into business support when it was published.
Yes, I agree with a lot of it. Education is the key stage to educate people! Let's get 'enterprise' into the mainstream, it's fun and its good for people to understand more about it.
Yes, there is a plethora of UK business support organisations. So we do need simplification (BSSP is the first serious attempt at this after years of pure rhetoric) and we do need a signposting service (and some gap filling). There is a role for Business Link. There are also some truly excellent people in the BL setup, internally and suppliers too. An expensive operation, but my guess is that we are the world leaders in this field.
At last we have a public sector brand that has lasted more than five minutes: Business Link. Think back to the £1.3 billion a year that was pumped into the business support role of the TECs, which had barely got organised before they were ordered to start the process of winding down.
What we all loathe is the endless procession of new initiatives and reorganisations, the wasteful public procurement regimes in the name of "the public interest" (which contrast so starkly with the way corporates achieve value for money in their purchasing), the focus on hard-to-reach groups who are often the least suitable candidates in the whole country to risk starting up their own business (the saying 'lambs to the slaughter' sometimes springs to mind) so that precious few resources are left for helping the bulk of businesses, and the onerous internal box ticking requirements that seem to dominate modern business support like everything else in the public sector. But that is all dictated to the Business Links, they don't like it any more than the rest of us. Let's deal with the cause (the never-ending stream of policy and new targets from central govt, directly or via the RDAs) rather than the symptoms (BL's modus operandi).
A central issue that I don't think Doug Richard noted was that Business Links are forced to focus firstly on surviving as an organisation, and only secondly can they focus on their (ever-shifting)business support remit. Business Links have been under attack from Day 1, just as their predecessors were and just as their successors will be.
It's easy to criticise the Business Links, really easy, but my guess is that we'll simply replace them with another quango that will be given the same poisoned chalice.
Hmmn, lots of spicy adjectives, this is veering into rant territory so I'd better stop here and see if anyone else has any views. Like so many of us, I could write a book on how I would set up business support, alas I don't think anyone is going to ask me to do it.
Meanwhile my company continues to play a major part in creating the businesslink.gov website (which is miles better than I had ever dared hope ... BERR did a great job on it and hopefully HMRC will continue in this vein) while paradoxically we also do our own business advice websites too(marketingdonut, startupdonut, lawdonut). The government is one of our biggest clients while also being our strongest competitor.
Looking ahead, hopefully businesslink.gov will do more signposting to outstanding private sector websites like ours, which Doug Richard I'm sure would approve of ... but I'm not holding my breath.
Rory MccGwire
BHP Information Solutions
see the later comments at
http://robert-craven.blogspot.com/2009/08/business-link-business-support-and.html
Richards was in Cannes this weekend. Good man.
see the later comments at
http://robert-craven.blogspot.com/2009/08/business-link-business-support-and.html
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