Belfast City Council is offering to help Belfast-based businesses on their growth journey.

Support covers a broad range of areas including human resources, exporting, digital transformation, financial planning, strategic management, business planning, marketing, tendering and so much more.

Paul McNicholl, Director of Belfast based web design and development company, Big House Creative tells us how Belfast City Council has supported his business:

鈥淲e鈥檙e a Web Design and Development company based in Wellington Park Business Centre in Belfast. We work with a wide range of commercial and non-profit organisations to help design their websites with a focus on user experience and user interaction to grow their business online.

鈥淥ur brand has been around for just over two years and our core business typically came from leads generated via our website. We identified tendering as a potential growth area, but our return on the time taken to create a tender versus success rate just wasn鈥檛 viable. We contacted Belfast City Council and were assigned a mentor for a number of days to help us with our tendering process.

鈥淥ur mentor quickly showed us how to properly evaluate which tender opportunities we should bid for 鈥 and the importance of seeking feedback when we were unsuccessful. With our mentor鈥檚 guidance, we were able to learn from feedback and refine our tenders. We鈥檝e since been awarded four tenders, with only one rejection. We鈥檝e also adopted this way of thinking in our normal proposal process and we鈥檙e looking at our business differently as a result.

鈥淲e鈥檝e also learned how to better understand how our customers think, and how to communicate technical processes in a much more accessible way.

鈥淭his free programme has made a significant positive impact on our business and by continuing to apply what we鈥檝e learned through the process and thinking differently about how our customers perceive us, we鈥檙e now growing our business.鈥

To find out more about the free support that Belfast Council can provide, .