This is Global Entrepreneurship Week and there is a host of fresh initiatives to get new businesses started and growing businesses to fulfil their potential.
It’s easy to see why the government is keen to do so, with cut backs in the public sector and big businesses stalling, getting people to start their own companies will not only provide employment for the founders but also for many more that get hired as these start-ups grow.
The Government’s economic policy objective is to achieve ‘strong, sustainable and balanced growth that is more evenly shared across the country and between industries’. What this means is less reliance on the financial sector and to spread jobs beyond the South East.
Company Partners is playing its part in this by providing a “dating site” for people who want to start a business find a business partner with complementary skills to join with them. It’s less daunting with a partner.
Of course we also provide access to Mentors and Business Angels that help with their contacts, expertise and investment. This combination of access to Business Partners, Mentors and sources of investment is unique to Company Partners, so if you haven’t already, register and have a look around.
What we do is a practical and successful way of encouraging businesses to grow. There is some criticism that many of the government initiatives are difficult to access and sometimes look better on paper than in reality. This is what’s been announced this week:
- Two entrepreneurs in residence will be recruited at BIS. They will help advise Government on small business issues, making sure that the needs of entrepreneurs are properly considered by policy makers
- Warwick and Aston Business Schools have been chosen to host a new £2.9 million enterprise research centre. Its work will help improve understanding of the drivers and barriers to growth that affect our small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs)
- The launch of a new £1.1 million Entrepreneurs and Education Programme that will work with academics, researchers and students to promote enterprise, self-employment and help commercialise innovations
- A push to encourage businesses to make better use of the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS) that provides generous tax benefits to SME investors
- New access to a secure web-based portal for adult prisoners that will provide opportunities for them to learn about how they can start a business when they are released.
Whether these individually make a difference can be debated, but the overall intention is right and the government’s efforts to grow small businesses creates an encouraging climate of enterprise.
Credit to Company Partners for providing this type of valuable information and comments. The government approach however is pretty dismal. I remember the cock-up of appointing Lord Sugar as an “enterprise overlord” – Sugar was a total disaster and waste of time and these new efforts suggest that we are still going down the same old negative pathways. All they are creating is another bunch of expensive time wasters who will only talk the talk and write the write of masses of paper which will never achieve anything. They need to appoint and fund a real go-getter along the lines of MET Commissioner Brenden Hogan-Howe.
BHH has set up a sort of “Come And Meet Us” day so that anybody or any firm, small or large, can attend at a venue and “pitch” their ideas and or products to the MET police force. There are no fees or charges and all you have to do is pre-pitch to a panel who sort the worthwhile from the pointless. At the first venue in London companies as large as Thales had a table next to a one-man band entrepreneur and BHH stopped and chatted to every participant and his staff and officers also followed through.
The government could do a similar “enterprise!” two-or three day event whereby they provided the venue free of charge. Identified about 50 of the top venture capital companies such as Company Partners. Allowed each one to screen and select ( without charge ) about ten successful applicants and issued free invitations to as many investors as possible.
At the venue each “Angel” company would mount its own pavilion and support its ten chosen
entrepreneurs. The “Angel” companies would mentor its chosen ten and would contract to receive a stated percentage of any of its ten who raised money due to the event.
Such an event would be a much more positive use of government cash than groups set up to talk the talk.
Never, ever, whatever the circumstances (or how desperate you are!) have anything to do with any Government schemes of any shape or kind now or at any time in the future. If the Government could even just run ‘the government’ then that would be a miracle in itself -
The best thing the government can do to help SME’s is to take the tax off employment and improve education. When will they realise that they are taxing us to be uncompetitive in the global business enviornment, which effects all business in the end. The USA has cheap energy and Asia has cheap motivated, educated and engaged labour, what do we have ???