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Supercharging the speed of business

What if you could have your own motorway lane to get to work and then drive at whatever speed you wanted, rather than fighting with all of the other commuters for lane space and suffering all the usual speed restrictions.  You’d probably jump at the chance.

Fighting for space, what you experience going in to work every day, is what it’s like for millions of business users, employees and partners with poor internet speeds.

Internet speed is holding back British business

Let’s be honest, what was fast internet access a few years ago is pretty slow today. We’re all used to our new mobile moving to the latest ‘G’ when we upgrade every two years or so, and then suddenly we can see live streamed footage of our favorite sports team, seamlessly, in high resolution. So why hasn’t business kept up with high speed internet at the same pace?

These days high speed exchanges feed broadband internet into most UK towns and cities, and the UK now has 95% coverage for broadband with speeds of 24 Megabits per second or higher.  However, many  businesses are stuck at the mercy of the rickety old telephone wires that are limited in the speeds they can support. If it’s copper wires that link a business premise to the high speed exchange cabinet, which might even be miles away, then this can create grindingly slow broadband connections for staff.

For fast, reliable business broadband,  a full fibre optic cable connection is required. Fibre is capable of delivering Gigabit speeds, and one Gigabit is 1,000 Megabits, so it’s a big leap forward in connection speeds that could benefit you and your business into the future. But the key challenge for most smaller businesses has not so much been the cost of Gigabit speed line rental, but the high cost of installation of this type of high speed line to their premises.

UK Government Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme (GBVS)

Launched in March 2018 the GBVS is a £67m UK government fund that currently runs until March 2019. GBVS is a grant contribution to pay towards upgrading broadband to a high-speed Gigabit capable connection. To put it in context, to stream an HD movie you would need a connection speed of about 5 Megabits per second (Mbps), so with a 1 Gbps line up to 200 people could watch an HD movie simultaneously . Full fibre also supports symmetrical connections – meaning your upload and download speeds can be the same.

Most UK small and medium sized organisations, in all sectors, with 1 to 250 employees and less than £50m turnover, could be eligible for a GBVS grant of up to £3,000. This grant can be used to help pay for a high speed broadband connection as part of a group project, or directly to a single business premises.

This is how the Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme works, managed by the UK Government Department for Culture Media and Sport.

UK Government GBVS Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme

  • Find out if you are eligible for the GBVS scheme – click here
  • Find out how NUCO International has benefited – click here

Why high speed Internet is crucial for your business

Mobile devices are actually part of the problem many businesses now have. New faster mobiles and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) programs, supporting workers’ own and business smartphones and tablets, incrementally grow the demand for Internet bandwidth. More people and more high speed Internet-linked devices in your company simply soaks up your limited bandwidth, and also the speed that bandwidth can deliver when accessed almost all the time. And it’s the same effect whether people are connected to your internet by cable, or using company Wi-Fi to manage business requirements on a PC or mobile.

At home, the lack of a high speed internet connection may be frustrating, with occasional breaks in your movie or the ‘spinning wheel of death’ as content buffers. But, with your business, slow internet speed is a potential future killer. It’s not just the lost productivity, when your staff can’t upload and download files they’ve been sent on email quickly, it’s the lack of options you then have to make your staff more productive, and to collaborate with each other more easily.

Don’t despair, here are just five of the opportunities that businesses with high speed Internet can make the most of straight away, today:

Cloud computing applications

Most people have heard of this and examples of cloud computing are things like mobile email, social media and Spotify that we all use at home. But, in business, growth in cloud computing services and resources can keep your employees more focused and more productive. For example they could use products like Microsoft’s Office 365 to access meeting details, contacts or emails on their laptop or mobile, or contribute to a team conversation via an online project site. And all of this information and data is synchronised in real time in the cloud, inevitably requiring a consistently fast connection to the internet. The longer the response time from an outside resource, like a cloud based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, the more that users can waste time and lose focus on their business task at hand. Since the number of applications hosted by cloud providers have jumped a hundredfold in the last five years, companies need to upgrade their Internet connections urgently to maintain quick response times, and so their staff can interact and contribute rapidly, and remain constantly productive.

Big emails and multimedia websites

These days businesses rarely send the two or three line emails of old. Email has become a lot more visual, and photos and graphics have become part of almost every message, helping to share ideas and better explain the wider concepts of projects. They say a picture is worth 1,000 words, but a 500 page document written in Microsoft Word is about the same size as one email picture attachment. Not only that, but modern websites have abandoned pages of text for shiny new websites with photos, logos, banners and, increasingly, high resolution videos. All of these inevitably require far more bandwidth, in order to avoid longer load times to view them. Video streaming takes even more bandwidth. Few will notice the speed loss when one or two staff click on the latest video on YouTube. But when you’re talking about streaming business webinars, as well as streaming instructional videos or online courses, your bandwidth can disappear in a hurry and other important work using the internet can very soon slow to a crawl.

VoIP telephones

VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol. It has become the dominant technology as businesses have brought in new VoIP phones to replace older landline systems. There are many great reasons to switch to VoIP, including things like caller recognition, but each VoIP conversation takes about 100Kb of bandwidth each and every second. If your company has just a few employees then that’s rarely a problem, but if you have 20 staff on the phone at any one time, you could easily max out all of your upstream speeds on most common business Internet plans. Without the right speed connection, call quality and data traffic also both suffer. A high speed Internet connection requires an ample supply of upstream bandwidth to maintain high-quality, real-time VoIP conversations, but high speed fibre connection services will have carrier service level agreements in place to provide and guarantee these high quality voice connections.

Video conferencing

When every company is looking for ways to increase the pace of their business by improving collaboration, whilst at the same time reducing travel time and costs, it is no surprise that video conferencing has become a lot more popular. With many low cost video conferencing products now available, the lure to push a button rather than book a flight for business meetings is very strong for both business team managers and accountants. It’s easy to understand why more businesses are moving to video conferencing every day, and high speed Internet service means better video meetings and increased staff productivity. But since images require a lot more bandwidth than text, streaming video consequently demands plenty of Internet bandwidth. Slow Internet speeds mean bad meetings, broken connections and frustrated staff, especially if some contributors  in a different global location have got up specially to attend the video meeting.

Protecting your valuable data and files

Beyond basic local file backup, all companies recognise that backing up data offsite simplifies business continuity and disaster recovery planning. With more high resolution video, photos and diagrams, the amount of data backed up is constantly growing. Backing up their data using a slow Internet connection creates lots of problems, even if backup is scheduled to run overnight. High-speed Internet connections make rapid, complete backups possible, protecting your critical data and ensuring your business can continue, even if you suffer a data loss due to equipment failure, disaster or data theft. As of May 2018 there’s also the GDPR regulations to consider, where you need to make sure that any data that you hold on individuals is securely held, processed and backed up in line with stringent regulations that apply to all sizes of organisation.

Conclusion

Few of us would also have guessed at half of the devices that have arrived over the last ten years that use an Internet connection. Who knows what web-enabled bit of kit might hit the market next, especially with the Internet of Things?

Wouldn’t it be a crime if you couldn’t download that critical business email attachment simply because your Internet-enabled fridge was doing the drinks stock-up order at an online supermarket?

But, seriously, if you want to remain technologically fit for the future then the lack of high speed broadband could become a life threatening barrier to your business efficiency, or it could drastically limit your planned growth and success.

Get Gigabit speed connected. Find out about the GBVS today here.

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Advertise with LinkedIn video

You may have seen company videos appearing on LinkedIn recently. With the right video content, brands can now use sight, sound and motion to tell compelling stories, and drive deeper engagement on LinkedIn feeds and individual and company updates.

LinkedIn update results tracking, introduced in May 2015, allowed marketers to track how their LinkedIn updates matched with their website traffic. Video was the obvious next step, and video for individuals launched on LinkedIn in August 2017, and the results achieved by early adopters of video on the popular business social media platform have been very encouraging.

As of July 2018, LinkedIn launched video for their Sponsored Content and Company Pages. This is no surprise because, in a busy world, we’d all rather watch an interesting video rather than read through even a short amount of text and then click on a link to find out more.

In 2017 there was a 17% growth in the use of video by businesses globally, and that’s not a huge revelation given how easy it is to create sharp, high resolution video these days. We’ve all seen those adverts during the World Cup encouraging us to be film producers on our iPhones (other phones with video facilities are available).

The barrier for entry when it comes to video creation has been dramatically lowered by the advent of these high-res smartphone cameras, inexpensive accessories and simplified mobile, laptop or cloud editing software.

Creating LinkedIn video ads

81% of businesses are now using video as a primary marketing tool, and marketing departments in all sizes of business can now create quality video content without needing the sort of specialised resources and post production video editing that was once required.

With the cost to entry being so low, it’s almost a question of ‘why wouldn’t you?’ rather than the other way around. However, independent filmmaker C. Mason Wells hit the nail on the head when he was asked about the greatest challenges in cinema today. He said:

“The act of making movies has never been easier, but getting people to care about them has never been harder.”

This is certainly a lament that rings true in the world of video marketing. But, as with any type of content in our highly saturated digital environment, the struggle is to both find and captivate the right audience for your products or services. This has been especially true for B2B marketers, who haven’t had an ideal platform for sharing and amplifying their business-related videos. Whilst most marketers use YouTube or Vimeo to host their B2B videos, they rely on search for these on the video channels to drive traffic to their website and to encourage customers to buy what they sell.

Until now. There is no doubt that all B2B marketers see LinkedIn as a primary social media tool to reach a business audience, whether through the carefully developed networks they’ve honed since LinkedIn launched in 2003, or through the company channels that they manage.

The jury is still out on what types of video will ultimately work best on LinkedIn, as all new features on social media platforms often involve some level of experimentation and guesswork.

But there are some relatively straightforward guidelines to follow to help your brand and company succeed with LinkedIn video ads.

  • Choose a campaign objective tied it to your video marketing approach
  • Consider your ROI and measure progress against that objective
  • Follow best practice for social video (length, sound, structure etc.)
  • Find a ‘sweet spot’ in terms of audience target and campaign budget
  • Drive follow-up action with a clear and enticing Call To Action (CTA)
  • Test and optimise your campaign videos for continual improvement

LinkedIn video features

Native video ads represent an evolution of LinkedIn Sponsored Content, letting you engage with business decision makers throughout their buying journey on LinkedIn. Unlike pre-roll or post-roll video ads, video for Sponsored Content lives directly in the news feed as a standalone post.

Video for Sponsored Content helps you achieve your marketing objectives by:

  • Building brand awareness – telling rich, visual stories via social media
  • Driving qualified traffic direct to desktop or mobile website pages
  • Collect high-quality leads with a persistent “call to action” button
  • Utilise LinkedIn’s integrated Lead Gen Forms product for leads

But without accurate targeting, your ads won’t be seen by the right audiences. With LinkedIn’s suite of B2B targeting capabilities available for video for Sponsored Content, you can find your audience by traits like job title, seniority, company name, industry, skills etc. What’s more, the integration with Matched Audiences ensures you can target your Sales team’s highest-priority accounts with account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns.

Since LinkedIn launched the private beta in October 2017, over 700 advertisers including GE, Philips and Audi Canada have tested video for Sponsored Content to highlight not only their products and services, but also their company mission, customer success stories and thought leadership content. These videos are helping marketers deepen brand engagement as, on average, LinkedIn members spend almost 3x more time watching video ads compared to time spent with static Sponsored Content.

“Video content is crucial for our brand, allowing LinkedIn’s professional community to more easily derive value from the content we are producing. While our videos can be up to 3 minutes, we are seeing deep engagement at a great value.”
Kaydee Bridges, Vice President, Digital & Social Media Strategy, Goldman Sachs.

All marketers understand that everything hinges on delivering greater ROI. With video for Sponsored Content, you can measure campaign success through insights and detailed breakdowns about the types of professionals watching, engaging with and even converting on your video ads. LinkedIn’s proprietary Conversion Tracking tool is also integrated, enabling you to measure the number of leads, sign-ups, website visits, and other valuable actions that your video content generates.

“Video stands out because it doesn’t tell, but it shows. On a platform where there’s more business content, a video stands out more, especially on LinkedIn.”
Renske Siersema, Social Media Manager at KLM Royal Dutch Airlines

Conclusion

When it comes to creating your great B2B video content, well that’s entirely down to you. But when it comes to getting the right people to notice and care about those videos, there’s no doubt that LinkedIn can now help your brand get your products, benefits and values across more easily to your target audience.

  • Download the LinkedIn advert video guide – click here
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Digital marketing top 10

The range of marketing options to promote products and services has increased radically over the last ten years. We look at our predicted top 10 biggest influencers on B2B product and service clients for 2018.

1. Video – In 2017 there was 17% total growth in video usage. 81% of all businesses now use video as a marketing tool. 78% of marketers say video generates a good return on investment and the ideal video is 90 seconds to 3 minutes long, with interesting, engaging and thought provoking content. 50% of web users look for videos before they buy a product and 4x as many customers watch a video than read about a product. Video on websites is responsible for a 64% increase in product purchase, it increases average website visit time and increases sales conversions on the site by 20%. Almost twice as many people say they will purchase a product after seeing a video versus non-viewers. Last year YouTube reached 1 billion views of posted videos and it is the second biggest search engine after Google. Vimeo is another option.

2. Social media –Key to engage a target audience in real-time. Facebook group has suffered from negative press in 2018 regarding data trust, but is still core for B2C. In a B2B environment, LinkedIn is still the most important while Google+ remains good for SEO. Other options are Twitter and Instagram. Bear in mind that you should aim to get contributions from those 3% to 5% that have active engagement (share and click on content), rather than people who have more click-jerk passive engagement (liking something).

3. Thought leadership – this can take many forms such as broadcast media interviews, video interviews, trade press interviews, online blogs or fact sheets. The key is delivering content that gets the target audience to challenge their own and their peer’s views of the status quo on products and services.

4. Blog articles – These offer the ideal way to establish thought leadership, if placed in the right trade press and online publications. They allow you to promote the company and products and help with SEO. Whilst most other online media has become briefer, blogs have consistently got longer (around 1,300 words average), showing that there is an audience out there that enjoys a good read on popular topics.

5. Pictures, graphics and infographics – A picture is worth a thousand words as they say, particularly if you want to convince target clients to buy a manufactured product that sells itself visually. Pictures of products in motion or from unusual angles engage interest, and graphs and infographics promote understanding of more difficult or esoterically dry, data driven concepts.

6. Email – Crafting compelling direct marketing campaigns via email is still very important for direct one to one engagement with a target audience. Getting your audience to click from a newsletter/email content to your website is a highly effective driver of traffic to the website. Not surprisingly the key is in ensuring the content is engaging and click worthy, predominantly good quality news items and blogs. However, with GDPR now in place across Europe, it is essential to view this as an in-house activity, with opt-in email contact data directly fed from a CRM system, or integrated as part of your chosen email system.

7. White papers – Perfect for communicating complicated information about products and deployment applications, without clouding the issue with sales messages that might turn a more technical audience off. They still include a strong call to action to draw readers to the website or engage with the sales team.

8. 3D and VR – Virtual reality walk-arounds and fly-throughs are becoming increasingly useful for delivering complex information about products and how they may benefit prospective customers. They are also especially useful if the products they are selling are particularly large, so you can have a 3D animation or walkthrough on a portable tablet. They are also of benefit for demonstrating motion, movement or a cutaway of a product to illustrate advantages that could not be achieved any other way.

9. Podcasts and webinars – Broadcasting content to a selected audience is effective to engage target contacts with more complex messages and / or those on the move using mobile devices with limited time to assimilate information. Webinars can deliver complex presentations online and enable visitors from disparate locations to engage at the same time, as well as allowing interaction between the presenters and audience using filtered questions and answers. A recorded version of the webinar for those that missed it can also be made available on a video channel and can also serve to drive more website traffic.

10. Landing pages – Unlike standard web pages, these are designed to include product information and specific, strong calls to action. These are useful for product or service offers, seasonal specials or events, all of which have a time-based element. They can also be hidden away from the main website to provide a home for specific campaigns that allow you to track who visits a campaign page and its effectiveness over time.

Conclusion

The biggest challenges for board members and marketing professionals is keeping abreast of all of these technological changes and being able to select the best combination to create awareness, interest, trial and adoption of B2B products and services.

If you would like to know how GET Consultants can help you in developing a more effective marketing mix for your business, please contact us here.

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The power and challenges of Scale Ups

UK scale up businesses, most between £10m and £40m turnover, are growing at over 20% a year.
Scale up business numbers are doing well, growing by 12% YOY from 31,440 to 35,201 (ONS data 2016).

Whilst scale ups represents just one percent of all UK businesses, only one percent more UK scale up businesses would create an extra 238,000 jobs and add £225bn in GVA (Scaleup Institute report on UK Economic Growth 2014).

Many scale ups are growing at rates of 50% a year and higher, and this creates all manner of challenges to continue further successful growth. Factors like staff recruitment and access to skills, growth funding, local infrastructure and export markets.

There is clearly lots to do to break down the barriers scale ups face. Local and government funded organisations are now aiming to ensure scale ups are a national priority, get them embedded into the local fabric of the communities in which they operate, and deliver scale up business support solutions across both the private and public sector.

Start Ups versus Scale Up Businesses

A start up is often defined by its main challenge, a search for a repeatable and scalable business model. A start up becomes a scale up after it has validated its business model hypothesis, solved all of the many start up challenges, like seed funding and skills for development, and is ready for growth. This stage of growth, often almost exponential growth, is called ‘crossing the growth chasm’, a phrase originating from marketing guru Geoffrey Moore in 1991.

The reason start ups are important to the UK is that without a vibrant start up community it is difficult to get to the point where you have enough companies to then go on to scale up. Every healthy country economy needs a pool of local start ups that naturally lead on to scale ups, as the latter exist on top of a solid start up ‘ecosystem’.

In order to flourish, a scale up business requires a solid pool of established companies interested in providing growth opportunities. The World Economic Forum assesses the expansion challenges affecting these types of business, and stresses the importance of the scale-up phase directly after the start-up phase.

What is a scale up business?

So when does your start up become a scale up? A Scale Up is a company who has an average annual increase in turnover of at least 20% over the past three years, and who has at least ten employees at the start of the period (OECD 2007).

Scale Ups that are visible can be ascertained due to that fact that all UK companies are required to disclose their turnover if two out of the three following conditions are true:

  1. Annual turnover exceeds £10.2m
  2. Business assets exceed £5.1m
  3. More than 50 employees

So defining which UK businesses are scale ups is easy, right? Well unfortunately not. Whilst there are clear criteria for a scale up, based on size, numbers of staff and growth by turnover, not all scale ups are currently visible.

Only if a business has a turnover of just over ten million can it be revealed if they are growing at the defined 20% rate, unless those companies that are smaller also choose to declare their turnover. So there is actually an as yet unknown pool of ‘invisible’ scale ups that may already be growing at a rate of 20% or greater, with less than ten million in turnover, less than 50 staff, or business assets under five million pounds.

UK Government focus on Scale Ups

The 2017 UK Government Industrial Strategy White Paper focused on the value of scale ups and recognised them as part of the overall solution to UK productivity challenges across all industry sectors.

Whilst the white paper took forward areas of recommendations originally made by the ScaleUp Institute via joint reviews, and the background work of the Scaleup Taskforce, it confirmed the critical importance to UK Scale Ups of R&D funding, skills, access to finance and infrastructure. It frames the importance of people, location, business and technology infrastructure and business environment for the future growth of these critical businesses.

Exports are also key for UK government, piloting intensive export growth support for potential scale-ups and ambitious medium sized businesses. This now includes co-investment to access commercial export support services, with each eligible business offered a grant on a 50:50 match funded basis. Local Enterprise Partnership Growth Hubs are also working to ensure scale ups receive easily accessible and ‘joined up’ export and business growth advice.

Why are scale ups so important?

Evidence from a variety of sources shows scale up businesses are across all industry sectors, and that they generate more productive jobs than the average, with around £235,000 of turnover for each business per employee. They also provide employment opportunities for all local people across a varied spectrum, from work experience to apprenticeships, and from graduates to non-executive directorships.

Despite what you might imagine, many successful scale ups are not ‘techie’ businesses. In fact the majority of scale ups are ‘non-tech’, companies that are successfully using technology but usually not creating it themselves.

Many scale ups are also more than 20 years old, with only a third younger than 10 years old. This indicates that many of the UK’s older and more stable companies clearly have the potential for growth, although data shows they are most likely to be growing at a moderate pace of around 20 to 40% per annum.

The UK’s total number of scale up businesses that increased their turnover and/or staff numbers annually by over 20 percent over a three-year period has increased by 12%.

However, when differentiating between types of scale up business, two distinct patterns emerge:

  • An increase in overall scale ups growing by turnover
  • Small decrease in scale ups growing by employees
  • Only 20% are growing against both measures

Local leaders from the public and private sector are continuing to build on existing schemes to help UK scale ups. Many of the original schemes were galvanised by the Scaleup Institute education programme on ‘Driving Economic Growth through ‘scale up ecosystems’, supported by Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Small Businesses UK and Innovate UK.

These initial programmes did set multiple scale up projects in motion, working to develop tailored initiatives for scale up business leaders. In turn this led to inclusion of scale ups in local Strategic Economic Plans through local authorities and the 38 Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) in England set up by the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS), as well as the three national LEPs in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

What scale up businesses want

Scale Ups have indicated that, to continue to grow successfully, they need solutions to five common challenges:

  1. Access to talent and skills – finding and recruiting the employees to hire who have the skills they need
  2. Access to new markets – new UK customers and navigating the best ways to access export markets
  3. Leadership capacity – improving the breadth, knowledge and skills of the key people in the business
  4. Finance – accessing the right type and combination of affordable finance to help effective growth
  5. Infrastructure – including premises, space, warehousing and local and technology infrastructure

Many ambitious scale up leaders want to scale more and where they need most help is on talent, access to markets and leadership. People with the right skills remain their top priority, and access to talent the greatest hindrance.

Whether they are recruiting new employees, tapping into the experience of business mentors or Non-Executive Director, who have successfully grown businesses, people are top of mind of scale up leaders to continue to deliver rapid year-on-year growth. This includes building out leadership capacity and seeking the skills needed to expand their global aspirations, including finding international talent.

Not surprisingly, scale up business leaders most value locally-rooted resources to foster their growth, with local solutions tailored to their needs and peer-to-peer networks and events where they can meet their counterparts.

They also see the importance of and seek easier access and deep connections with local educations and university research facilities, collaboration partners, local authorities, other businesses and government agencies.

The importance of financial support is also key. Scale up companies receiving equity investment are more likely to grow their turnover faster, Basically, the more equity investment they receive, the faster they grow. The majority of scale ups that have received finance raised less than £5m. It is an obvious conclusion that if investors had deeper pockets to give the companies more investment, this would enable scale ups to grow faster.

Key scale up challenges

Over half of the Scale Up businesses in a Scaleup Institute 2017 survey perceived no relevant support existing for them, a situation that needs to be remedied urgently. While scale up business leaders did recognise that there are national Government initiatives, they said that they were not always immediately visible, and they want these initiatives delivered locally, in a manner much easier to navigate and access as and when they are required.

There is a great deal of education required at government, local authority, LEP, county Chamber and local business level. An integrated local scale up ecosystem needs to be created and fostered, a support structure regarded as ‘match fit’ for scaling businesses at every stage of their growth journey.

Part of the challenge is showing local businesses that their challenges are already well understood, and improving awareness of immediate solutions that are available to help their growth. This will require good scale up business case studies and success stories and local events and networking groups, to highlight well-evidenced, impactful programmes and practices from which scale up business owners and leaders can learn, emulate and improve.

Also, without a coordinated database of Scale Up businesses and key leadership contacts within them, the resources these businesses require may simply not get to where they are needed most. Broad advertising to them may help, but one to one contact with scale up business owners and leaders is likely to have the greatest long term impact.

Many organisations are already contacting scale ups directly to offer their help and support, by mail, email, phone and through various social media channels. However, there are now multiple data handling considerations to consider in a direct contact approach, including storage and broadcast of personal data. All of these data issues will need managing very carefully, in order to avoid falling foul of UK data protection and new EU GDPR legislation.

Conclusions

Better knowledge of what scale ups really need is urgently required. This includes local scale up business research, analysis, policy and data, ultimately to make sure that the limited funds available to scale ups are used in the best way possible to their current challenges and future expansion.

Scale ups are twice as likely as their peers to be centres of innovation in the UK, but research shows they are keen to see better access to R&D innovation funding and growth finance options delivered locally, along with access to the infrastructure that supports their innovation drive. Better local access to staff, new customer and export markets and improvement in leadership skills also remain critical components to future UK scale up business success.

Local businesses that meet the Scale Up definition and criteria should recognise that there are resources, skills and advice available to them now, to help them expand and grow further. LEPs all get a share of UK government funding to generate business growth, allocated through competitive bidding. These funds, as well as LEP staff, local growth hubs and local growth partners can help scale up businesses in all sectors to achieve their full growth potential.

  • Find your local LEP and growth Hub – click here

GET Consultants is holding a series of Scale Up Labs to help High Growth Small Businesses to transform and grow and avoid some of the pitfalls and barriers to long term and efficient growth.  Click for details

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Get the most out of business consultants

There are many benefits to parachuting in an external consultant, from helping your business grow, to raising funds, to helping you reach new markets or retain valuable clients. Andrew Kerry-Bedell looks at the best way to bring in a business specialist to help you with a particular discipline such as strategy, sales, marketing, branding or to raise finance.

Businesses usually bringing in specialists because they don’t have the time or suitable expertise in-house, a common issue for many small organisations. And a consultant can add value quickly, identifying barriers to business growth and enabling you to improve your customer awareness, financial stability and market competitiveness.

By hiring externally, companies can also instantly gain specific skills for certain projects, get an outsider’s perspective without an emotional investment to the business, and augment a business team to give them more resources for time-dependent tasks.

It is obviously important to understand what consultants are, what they do and how they achieve what you want from them. Think of any consultant as an expert in their field, usually focusing on a narrow set of specialties that they excel in deploying across a wide variety of market sectors. For example, A marketing consultant will be able to apply their skills to implement suitable solutions regardless of the industry or challenges faced by their client, whereas a finance consultant will be able to look at a business and map out a strategy to improve working capital and future funding.

The challenge for business owners is ensuring that they are utilising the resources of a consultant to the fullest and not putting any barriers in their way that might impede their potential success. There are four key factors to consider before investing in an external consultant.

Tell it how it is

For consultants to fully understand how your business ticks, they must have full visibility of the entire company. This includes the good and bad, financial issues, internal staff issues and everything in between. It is all too common for businesses to try to hide these negative aspects from external parties, but giving them this knowledge will help your consultants understand the landscape in which they are operating in, which will be critical for them to be successful.

Establish targets

Both parties should know what results are expected and being evaluated and nothing should be taken for granted. This discussion should be had before a plan of action is created, and ideally in advance of any longer term support contracts being signed. Without a joint understanding of the metrics used to measure expected success, one party may be under the impression that a project is going well, while the other might be woefully disappointed.

Discuss non-disclosure and intellectual property

It is a good idea to discuss what information is confidential within any documents or collateral shared, as well as who owns the intellectual property rights for any content created. Having this agreement at the beginning of the relationship avoids future misunderstandings. If in doubt, make sure you both sign a suitable contract and mutually acceptable Non Disclosure Agreement.

Explore challenges rather than setting objectives

Consultants are specialists who, by nature, will seek the best solution to the challenge laid out in front of them. By outlining the challenges faced by the business, the consultant can explore the causes and outline the best solutions, enabling the business to set objectives alongside any relevant staff of stakeholders. In the field of marketing, this could be a business hiring a consultant to improve the customer awareness, benefits and competitiveness of a product or service, rather than exploring the challenge of driving more traffic to the website, or taking a step back further to attract more sales leads.

Conclusions

By giving external consultants the ability to fully deploy their skills against a challenge, instead of assuming a solution and finding someone to deploy it, creative solutions can be found and companies can get a valuable new viewpoint on the obstacles they are facing, as well as the best options to solve them, helping to aid future growth.

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UK SMB growth potential

GET Consultants looks at why the manufacturing and technical sectors in the UK have capacity for growth, and what these business types can do to offset any risks to their future survival. He also looks at how we might rebalance the economy to unlock the potential of some of the fastest growing smaller companies in the UK.

The 2016 Coast to Capital report identified that there are specific barriers that are concerning for the scale-up and growth of UK medium sized businesses in two key sectors.

The reasons for business growth limitations fall into the three ‘C’s

  • Customers – both online and offline sales and marketing to create and retain local UK and overseas buyers
  • Capacity – capability to grow including staff, factories, office space, warehousing and overseas premises
  • Cash – easy access to finance at affordable interest rates to ensure growth when it is required

Creative and technical sector

Growth potential is around products, particularly technical innovation, ‘big data’, and increased interconnectivity that can create new products and services, both to consumers and in the supply chain. The second key area for growth is skills where increasing technology and creative expertise in technical and managerial positions are required, and they are increasingly merging. These skills are needed to drive the innovations that will create future new opportunities, and to exploit these opportunities and, in turn, manage business operations more effectively.

Key barriers to growth:

  • Lack of revenues for re-investment for scale-up and growth
  • Lack of ‘move-on’ premises that companies can grow into
  • Excessive workloads and intense competition for staff
  • Lack of staff training in technical and managerial skills
  • Lack of business visibility or profile

Advanced manufacturing and engineering sector

Globalisation is one of the key drivers for this sector, with increasing competition from countries such as China and Brazil as they move up the value chain and more research and development is conducted internationally. It is also increasing opportunities for companies to outsource their production, which in turn is increasing demand for supply chain management skills.

There are 3,400 Advanced Manufacturing and Engineering businesses in the Coast to Capital region, accounting for 4.4% of total businesses. This sector accounts for 4.3% of employment, around 33,000 people, with 12% growth in AME businesses between 2010 and 2014, around 2% slower than in the South East.

Key barriers to growth:

  • Difficulty for companies and managers to keep track of the rapid pace of technological change
  • Issues with providing staff training, both in identifying the best type of training and the cost of undertaking it
  • Shortage of strategic and supply chain management, production / process control and quality assurance skills
  • Gaining access to overseas contacts and markets and navigating overseas environments and regulations
  • Lack of strategic management to navigate and respond to rapid change and turn threats into opportunities

Conclusion

Every medium sized business sector needs a strategy for growth. Both of these two critical UK business sectors have scope to survive and thrive in a global economy, but having a strategic plan to do this has become essential.

Staff skills, both recruitment and training, have become critical, especially in areas like new technology. But business strategy for growth is paramount too. A good business strategy needs to have a clear focus and need not even be that big, just have the key detail of how you are going to forge your own future in the next five years.

GET Consultants is holding a series of Scale Up Labs to help High Growth Small Businesses to transform and grow and avoid some of the pitfalls and barriers to long term and efficient growth.  Click for details

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Is Britain really still great for business?

GET Consultants looks at the prospects for High Growth Small Businesses (HGSBs) and what might happen at Brexit point, barriers for growth for HGSBs, and what these businesses can do to offset risks to their future survival.

There’s a commonly held maxim that only one in five small businesses set up in Britain will survive five years, but the truth is a lot more complicated than that. It really does depend on how big you are already, what sector you’re operating in, where in the UK you are doing business and the plans you have to survive, transform and grow.

High Growth Small Businesses (HGSBs)

Octopus has produced three HGSB reports over the last few years, highlighting the importance of these businesses to the UK economy. HGSBs have more than 20% annual average growth over a three-year period and an annual turnover of between £1 million and £20 million. Whilst they make up less than 4% of the UK’s total GVA (Gross Value Added), HGSBs made a far more significant contribution, accounting for 22% of Britain’s overall growth between 2005 and 2006.

HGSB contribution to the UK economy:

  • They see value in training, with 84% funding training for at least one member of staff over the last 12 months
  • Only 1% of UK businesses, yet account for 3% of UK total jobs in 2016 (22,074 out of 5.6 million companies)
  • HGSBs created an average of just over 3,030 new jobs every week, around 20% of the jobs created in the UK
  • 74% of HGSBs surveyed feel confident in their economic prospects over the next year versus last year

What will Brexit mean for HGSBs?

There is a constant battle for a share of consumer revenue and profit from HGSB companies that deliver products and services, with the evolution of new technology changing the business landscape ever faster. Whilst business finance, trade deals, skilled labour and resources are the fighting ground of European and global politicians, they are also the lifeblood of most businesses which require access to all of these to grow and transform for future success.

The biggest challenge post Brexit is likely to be a skills shortage. Almost two thirds of HGSBs surveyed by Octopus consider finding talent and skills shortages to be an important or very important constraint on their business growth.

41% of HGSBs surveyed also consider skills shortages to be the policy area where UK Government action could make the biggest difference for their businesses. 90% of HGSBs say that they face some form of skills shortages. This is even more remarkable when placed in the context of the UK average of just 17% of companies that say they have a skills gaps or skill shortages vacancies. This means that, whatever deal the government delivers for the UK outside of the EU, sufficient skills and resources for continued growth will be paramount.

Barriers to growth – the need for change in business thinking

The 2016 Coast to Capital report, on businesses in the triangle from Chichester to Newhaven to Croydon, identified specific barriers that are concerning for the scale-up and growth of UK medium sized businesses in key sectors.

The reasons for business growth limitations fall into broad categories of three ‘C’s

  • Customers – both online and offline sales and marketing to create new local UK and overseas buyers
  • Capacity – Room to grow including factories, office space, warehousing and overseas premises
  • Cash – easy access to the type of finance at affordable interest rates to ensure growth when it is required

Based on the 2018 Octopus report one in three of HGSB companies there are also growth barriers outside of Brexit, customers, capacity and finance, issues that are specifically related to infrastructure of a range of types.

  • One in three HGSBs considers digital infrastructure to be a primary constraint on their business growth
  • 53% of HGSBs in London say poor transport links with other regions is a hindrance to their business and something that the Government could do more to alleviate.
  • 69% of HGSBs consider the UK Government’s Digital Communications infrastructure programme (as described in the Industrial Strategy Green Paper) to be “important” or “very important” to their business.

Conclusion

Every medium sized business needs a strategy for growth. Simply subsisting is no longer an option – just look at what is happening to the UK high street as consumers move to even more online purchasing.

Every business owner owes their staff the time and energy and focus to work out how they can best grow, thrive and survive. And that means sometimes getting out of the day-to-day office environment and regular comfort zone and confronting some of the toughest challenges that face British business – future skills, effective use of technology, new customers and finance.

GET Consultants is holding a series of Scale Up Labs to help High Growth Small Businesses to transform and grow and avoid some of the pitfalls and barriers to long term and efficient growth.  Click for details