Birmingham must urgently embrace the spirit of entrepreneurialism the city was built upon or face the spectre of “Detroitification,” the founder of the Custard Factory has warned.
Bennie Gray, who transformed the site in Digbeth from an industrial wasteland to a thriving business centre for media and arts-based firms, said start-up businesses represent a possible salvation of Birmingham’s economy as the country heads toward recession.
He has issued a call for the city to “urgently unleash our most important and least recognised economic resource - the entrepreneurial talent of our young people”.
READ MORE: {}
In a call-to-arms manifesto entitled A Challenge For Birmingham, printed in full on pages six and seven, Mr Gray said: “In the past Birmingham was known as “The City of a Thousand Trades”.
“Now, as we face the threat of economic meltdown, Birmingham must become the city of a thousand new opportunities - and that means unleashing our aspiring young entrepreneurs.”
Mr Gray, who said his plea was aimed just as much at the people of Birmingham as well as business support bodies in the city, pointed to BERR statistics showing the number of start-up businesss registering for VAT in the West Midlands trailed the national average.
“For a city that has the reputation for being a City of a Thousand Trades that’s little short of disgraceful. We have a reputation of being a diverse city with diverse activities. We should be ahead of the game in terms of start-ups.
“Creativity flows to some extent to the clash of cultures that is found in Birmingham - they say the typical Brummie wears a shamrock on his turban.
Most Read
“It’s all about cultures colliding hopefully in a productive and creative way. I have 20 years of seeing that happening at the Custard Factory.”
Mr Gray, whose SPACE organisation is also behind the Big Peg, a site for small-scale creative businesses in the Jewellery Quarter, said business support services needed to be more accessible to encourage entrepreneurs from all backgrounds.
“We need to look at the barriers to starting up small businesses.
“A lot of red tape has grown up in the last few years and if some of that was lifted it would be an encouragement for people to get started.”
Services and funding aimed at start-ups should be promoted more intensively and with less bureaucracy and the process to get funding should be made easier, he said.
Among other ideas on how the start-up economy can be stimulated, he pointed towards the working communities that have sprung up in the Custard Factory and the Big Peg as a model for the wider West Midlands economy.
“It’s commercially fertile as businesses share deals and projects between themselves.
Don’t miss
“They can also come together to share certain facilities as well as conducting marketing campaigns.”
Mr Gray suggested this model could be applied to the wider Birmingham economy.
He flagged up the opportunities for businesses trading with each other in the city which are not currently being exploited.
“We have the challenge to improve the infrastructure of communications within the city. We need something like a Google West Midlands for commercial purposes that would result in more intertrading within the region.
“We also need to promote what we produce to the outside world better. Overall the marketing of Birmingham is quite efficient for major enterprise but it doesn’t do much for smaller businesses.”
Mr Gray’s SPACE organisation runs creative industries-focused sites which provide a working space for over 2,000 people.