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As the region's business support network undergoes its biggest shake-up in years, Stuart Anderson speaks to a group of entrepreneurs to find out what needs to be done to make it more useful.
In Objective One-funded Merseyside, accountancy businesses have cottoned on to a DTI scheme that rebates 40 per cent of professionals’ fees for a whole range of services – including help with applying for business support. So you can get a grant to apply for a grant.
Then again, you might need the help. Across the North West a whole range of grants, loans, advice and investment programmes exists, differing not just from borough to borough but ward to ward. Much of the region’s European assistance (including Objective One and Two funding) is coming to an end in 2008. To make things simpler for companies seeking what aid remains, the North West Regional Development Agency has tasked Business Link with providing a single point of access to the full range of business support throughout the region and is, in the process, rationalising the service.
From April this year the five current county-based services will be consolidated into a single “universal” centre in Preston, which will be aided in delivery by a network of brokers scattered around the region. The managing director of the new service is Peter Watson, who says his appointment from a background at printing giant Polestar demonstrates that the NWDA is taking a business-led approach. He does, though, seem to have picked up a smattering of Quangolese since taking the job last September.
“We’re creating a regional service, locally delivered,” Watson says. “At the moment there’s a plethora of different services and business support schemes out there, with no easy path through them. We aim to make it a lot easier for businesses to walk through the gateway. Someone can walk into Preston and we can deliver something that works first time. We’re aiming especially at SMEs and looking to capture everything that’s available in terms of support, both public and private.”
The reorganisation of the Business Links and, especially, the decision to make them responsible for providing access to all of the NWDA’s business support activities, was broadly welcomed when it was announced in July of last year. The consolidation will, however, lead to a number of redundancies – mostly at the administrative level – and some concerns have been raised that, while the service might improve, its profile could become lower, leading fewer businesses to seek its help.
Conversations with local entrepreneurs over the years have borne out the hit and miss nature of the body to date: under the old system your experience has depended very much on the quality of your local Business Link advisor. Some people– such as Rachel Clacher of Wrexham-based “virtual PA” operator Moneypenny – have left their first meeting disgruntled, swearing they would prove the bastards wrong and make a success of their business idea without recourse to public sector aid. Others can’t speak too highly of their experience.
Joan Pooley is co-owner of the £5 million-turnover Rochdale recruitment business, Northern Employment Services. She first contacted Bolton-based Business Link advisor Yvonne Grady in 2005 to find out what help might be available marketing the company to a wider audience across Greater Manchester. She says, “Yvonne explained that different streams of funding were available at different times and that, at that point, there was no money available for marketing but there was for investment in computer hardware. So we went for that and received £4,000 toward our £50,000 investment in a new computer system. We also received a lot of advice, which was just as important as the money.
“Then, when the funding became available, we got a 25 per cent grant to help with our first six months’ fees when we signed up with Strike Marketing. That was worth £3,500.” James Halliburton, who runs Crewe-based design agency Mellowgraphic, had more of a mixed experience when he was looking for help to launch his new invention – “Waterbuoy”, the world’s first miniature illuminated self-inflating buoyancy device for items weighing up to a kilo that might be dropped overboard by careless boating enthusiasts. 
“I applied for everything and got some,” he says. “Grants in Cheshire are virtually useless. There’s too much money here already.” His best experience was with Stoke-based Different By Design which, in return for being credited as a sponsor, funds projects up to the prototype stage. “I just had to show them what I was doing – it took about half an hour,” he explains. A rather trickier foray into the world of grants took him, again, over the border into the Midlands.
This involved the EFS scheme, a collaboration between different universities in the Midlands (which is now closed to new applicants) to fund new businesses. “At first it was very good,” he says. “You have to go on one of their courses and you are assigned to one of the participating universities. I was assigned to Warwick and it turned out in the small print that they – alone among the participating universities – wanted a five per cent stake in the business.
“It eventually turned out that their funding was split into two parts, and I was able to access a quarter of the original sum, the support funding element which wasn’t contingent on me giving away any equity. The money was supposed to come through in summer 2006 but I had to chase and chase and eventually I got it in December.”
Halliburton also managed to take advantage of a rural business grant, accessed via the Crewe and Nantwich Business Link: “That was not a Cheshire-specific one, but it was no hassle to apply for – I just filled out a report and they gave me funding.” Despite the number of schemes he has managed to tap into, Halliburton still believes the business support system is fundamentally flawed.
“The main grants the Government supply are pretty-much impossible to get unless you are a big company,” he says. “That’s unfair. In general, larger companies have larger waste and, proportionately, it would be a lot more beneficial to invest £10,000 in a smaller company than £1/2 million in a big business.” Local businesses might sometimes struggle to find appropriate funding, but companies looking to relocate to the region, and especially Merseyside, from outside face no such problems.
Nick Bowles, managing director of Rugged Logic, a four year-old software firm that has just moved into new premises in Liverpool having outgrown its original London HQ, says he had never bothered applying for public sector funding until this date because he assumed it would involve untold hassle and endless form-filling. “But it was refreshingly straightforward,” he says. “I did all the applications myself. We chose Liverpool because of the existing call centre skills base but, mainly, he fact that Objective One unding was available.”
And the company has done uite nicely out of it. In addition to enjoying much lower accommodation costs than in London, Rugged Logic has received £400,000 from Merseyside Special Investment Fund’s Venture Fund, £150,000 from the Liverpool Seed Fund and a further £75,000 made up of Selective Finance for Investment (DTI funding administered by the NWDA) and Financial Assistance for Business from Business Liverpool. Bowles says he applied for the various funding streams after being made aware of them through negotiations with the
NWDA. “It may have helped that the NWDA could use us as a bit of a poster child – a case study of a business it had brought to the region,” he admits.
Let’s hope that, come April, everyone who contacts Business Link gets just as much help.
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