It’s My Business Info

Hi I’m Suzy, a Business Link advisor for the Yorkshire area. I’ve really enjoyed reading all the blogs that people have posted recently. Just thought I’d try and comment on a couple of the issues raised and answer some of your questions.

There have been quite a few people discussing grants and although grants are both important and useful, I would say that one of Business Link’s aims is to try and make businesses more sustainable. We are keen for people to be aware of their sustainability as a business and make judgments about whether their business is viable.

There are often problems when people choose to setup a social enterprise, because they are interested in the grants that they can get. I would get them to focus on what alternatives there are and evaluate the feasibility of their business regardless of the grants, because we cannot guarantee that they will always be there. We have to make sure that they can live past the most difficult initial five years. The businesses that are heeding our advice and are finding a proper business model are the businesses that will survive those difficult few years.

Grants need to be used wisely to make building blocks for the future. If you’re just taking the grant to stay alive, then when that grant dries up and there is no more funding, you’ll fold. We usually advise a feasibility study and the preparation of business plan. That will help to make sure that you have a genuine business proposal that’s viable.

Two people talked about a volunteer policy and it is absolutely vital that you get one if you’re dealing with volunteers. In the new world of employment law, volunteers need to be treated in their own right with appraisals, policies and procedures. If you don’t you will get sued. Volunteers have rights and should be treated with decency. Just because they’re giving their time up for free doesn’t mean they should be treated any less well than other employees.

A friend of mine who runs his own business is quite high profile, so he gets a lot of people who come out of college and want experience. Companies do tend to give young people experience by making them volunteers, however they are often unaware of the rights that these people have. Sometimes a volunteer might join an organisation being willing but not have the necessary skills to do any work straight away. It’s no use being impatient or unhelpful with them; they will need some direction, like you would treat a normal employee. Is it worth having a volunteer because of the support that they need? That’s an internal thing that the bosses need to decide. But you can’t just expect somebody give their time for free, ignore them and just expect them to get on with it.

I also wanted to talk about marketing. One of our bloggers said that mail shots don’t work and we would very much agree with this; target marketing is far more effective. A great form of marketing is PR; getting in the newspapers and winning awards. Winning awards does lots of things, it raises your profile if you win, but even more usefully, in order to win the award you have to review your policies, procedures and the way you do things in house. It’s very useful because of what has to happen internally in order for you to win the award.

Finding out about these awards is down to networking. A Microsoft theory about how to spend time at work suggests that you spend 70% of your time doing your own work, 20% looking at what you do better and 10% looking to the future and making plans. If you spend your time doing that, you’re always on the next move.

Hope this is useful and I’ll be back soon with some more thoughts. Suzy.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 17th, 2008 at 9:37 am and is filed under Suzy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.