At a recent presentation I was asked, "Have you got it in for the Business Link?". Actually the answer is "No I have not got it in for the BLs - I want them to do really well, to blow people away with legendary value-adding service".
In principle I think that anything that helps people run better businesses is a good thing.
My concern is that
1) no-one seems to care and
2) there are numerous examples of BL under-delivering in the customer's eyes (and if you even have to think about who the customer is then 'I rest my case'!)
So a quick visit on my recent postings on the subject:
ONE-MIN VIDEO:
My Solution for Business Support
BLOG POSTs:
Business Support - The BS/BIS Industry
Simplifying Business Support - a humbug/cynic's view
Doug Richards Rips into Business Link
The Truth Is... No-One Seems To Care About Business Link
I admit to playing Devil's Advocate and no, this is not BL-bashing, but actually quite the reverse. I have recently been involved in some really first-class and excellent BL projects so I know that BLs can deliver in every sense of the word.
Our businesses deserve the best, most appropriate, most relevant business support that is available ('free' or 'subsidised' or' paid for' is not the point).
Tax payers' money is used to deliver a service that should be blisteringly powerful for individual businesses and the business community. It is a great challenge.
10 comments:
Keep up the good work. We need people challenging us to deliver. You must keep pushing.
Jim
(still at a BL)
Robert, you are right.
1) no-one seems to care
2) there are numerous examples of BL under-delivering in the customer's eyes.
No comment.!?
Jeremy
Jeremy has summed it up. What a waste. What a shame.
Bonnie
We have been a client of our BusLink and their people are hugely variable. Some great. Some lousy. All very cheap.
As a supplier to/via BusLink we find them very paperwork-heavy and bureaucratic. Not really worth the effort for us. They have a great potential but never quite seem to fire on all cylinders.
Tim C
BusLink is a total waste of time and money. Give the money back to the taxpayers. Let the market do the talking.
Madge
At the earlier post
http://robert-craven.blogspot.com/2009/08/business-link-business-support-and.html Rory says:
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
Rory
Good luck is all I can say.
We have been both sides of the Bus Link fence (clients and delivery agents) and they have been over-bureaucratic and generally too slow despite their best intentions. We no longer work with them, for them or near them. As a first port of call for small businesses I think that they are probably great but once you emnploy a few people then their relevance becomes limited.
JM, Independent Business Consultant, London
Its a valuable post. everybody should read carefully and implement it.
BusLink is a total waste of time and money. Give the money back to the taxpayers. Let the market do the talking.
Madge
At the earlier post
http://robert-craven.blogspot.com/2009/08/business-link-business-support-and.html Rory says:
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
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