Small business support needs to be joined up - latest report from the NatWest SME taskforce in Bradford

Business support services need to be more joined up to help businesses find the advice and help they need - that was the key message from NatWest’s latest SME taskforce in the North of England.

The taskforce has been brought together to help entrepreneurs, financiers and business leaders work together to improve conditions for small businesses across the ��Ƶ.

The latest meeting - its first real world gathering since the pandemic - was held at the Impact Hub in Bradford, bringing together members of the national taskforce alongside representatives from Northern business groups.

The Impact Hub - a thriving social enterprise centre in the historic Little Germany district - earlier held a Business in the Community event focused on supporting businesses in the region. Speakers included NatWest group CEO Alison Rose.

The taskforce session was chaired by Andrew Harrison, head of business banking at NatWest.

Speaking about business support, he said: “It's the ever present problem - there is lots of support out there. All of us are providing support in different ways. But actually, how do you get that support targeted to the business owners who really need it most?

“The last thing we want to hear from a business is that they didn’t know about the support on offer…because it (the support) is there, and it is our job to ensure that those who need it know about it.”

Emma Degg, chief executive of the North West Business Leadership Team, said there was no “silver bullet” for improving business advice but that ways of sharing data and information had to be improved.

She said: “The work that we're looking at is how to share the data. So if you (the bank) turn somebody down, do you point to the growth platform? How do we interrogate where those informal nodes are coming from?

“So when an advisor says, Look, just don't waste your time on paperwork, are they also saying but if you want help in terms of your business plan, go here?”

Mr Harrison suggested the bank could help share that information.

Heather Waters, NatWest’s regional enterprise manager for commercial banking in the North West, said: "There is business support out there. There’s more than enough for every different stage. As a business, how on earth do you navigate that? That’s the challenge.

"If they are a hard-to-reach business, they're not on the high street, it's who are they working with, and how you work with them to get into those different business communities?

And talking specifically about the female entrepreneurs she has worked with, Heather said: "The support is there. It's how you get that female entrepreneur to know that support is there for them and it's right for them and they should be applying for it. It's that connectivity piece that was missing.”

The Impact Hub in Peckover Street, Little Germany, Bradford (Image: Reach)

One suggestion was that there could be a single point of contact for businesses - but that is not as simple as it sounds.

Alex Veitch, director of policy and public affairs at the British Chambers of Commerce, said his previous work included helping the Government set up Brexit helplines. And he said that even with a helpline covering that one subject, there were almost too many questions for one person to answer.

He said: "I'm not sure it's realistic, based on my professional experience at trying to do this stuff, to expect there to be a single point of contact, the person at the other end of which or even if they're an AI with a database, will have every single answer to every kind of small business in every single sector. That's not the place to go.”

Instead, the taskforce members agreed that business support agencies should work together to share information.

Janine Smith, director of the Greater Manchester Business Growth Hub, said: “One of the things we came to recognise ourselves is there is so much support there, and it's about understanding where to signpost people to.”

Janine said that in a “labour of love”, they had in Manchester created a Business Support and Funding Finder to help businesses through the maze.

She said: “Just in Greater Manchester there's 230 publicly-backed programmes, whether that be national funding or local.”

The support funder means businesses can answer a short list of questions to find support tailored to their needs, and can call a helpline for more information.

But that kind of unified helpline only works if businesses are made aware of it.

Janine added: “People need to know about us in the first place to get into it.”

Similarly, there was also a discussion on how many businesses do not know about the wide range of lenders of all kinds on the market.

Sharon Jandu, founder of Northern Asian Powerlist and the Yorkshire Asian Business Association (YABA), said her organisation made it its business to "connect with everybody" connected to the business world from banks to lobby groups and the public sector.

That means she also sees the need for owners of businesses of all sizes to be able to access the relevant information quickly.

She said: "The key thing with entrepreneurs at whatever level is access to social capital.

and access to knowledge. They know it's there but it needs to be relevant and it needs to be timely."

That, she says, is why entrepreneurs like using WhatsApp to share information quickly.

She added that events and conversations like the taskforce can help - “ and they help bring the right people to the right meetings”.

Charlotte Thomason - associate director of SMEs at the CBI - said the important thing was that businesses knew that free or affordable support was available, regardless of who offered it.

Speaking by videolink, she said: “It’s not about the individual organisation, it’s about the ecosystem of support - especially as a lot more businesses because of the pandemic are using Google and internet searches to find support and are then being led away from a lot of the free services that are available towards more paid-for services.”

Speakers agreed that the NatWest taskforce itself could help to bring business support specialists together.

Josh Robson, head of public affairs at the ScaleUp Institute, agreed that business leaders could help make it easier for firms to access advice.

He said: “The role of groups like this is to make sure that the businesses don't have to deal with going to the wrong door too many times.”

Andrew Leeming, from Boost, Lancashire’s Business Growth Hub, said: “If we can take one thing away from this taskforce, it's that we need to do collaboration properly. Not collaboration in isolation.

“As people who are delivering business support we need to be absolutely magnificent. We need to lead by personality, because there is no silver bullet to any of this. It's all about our networks, our connectivity, how we engage with people.

“We need to also get much better at storytelling. We need to be celebratory. We need to shine a light on what works really well.”

Taskforce member Martin McTague, national chair of the FSB, told BusinessLive after the session: “The point I made in the meeting was that most of the business support out there is very generic, misses the mark.

“NatWest have some data on it - they did a survey that showed that only 2% of the money spent on business support actually changed anybody's behaviour. So most of it is missing the mark.

“If you talk to individual businesses, they'll tell you that what they need is more bespoke advice - something there that is more specific to their businesses. Everything's too generic.”

Mr McTague said businesses found it very hard to get the information they needed.

He said: “Everybody's admitting that small businesses are very time poor but then you're expected to spend literally hours searching for the advice that you need. And maybe you don't know what you don't know.

“In many situations, you don't know who to ask or you don't know what the potential problem could be. So you need that bespoke advice.”

And Mr McTague said that conversations like that at the SME taskforce could help foster collaboration and ultimately improve the quality of business support.

The taskforce began with an introduction from Martin McTague, national chair of the FSB, who warned that businesses were facing increased cost pressures.

Next Kamran Rashid, chief executive of Impact Hub Bradford, introduced his centre’s work enabling businesses and social enterprises.

He said: “One of the things we really value ourselves on is the ability to engage at a really deep level of local level with communities, individuals and groups that may not otherwise engage in kind of mainstream services and support.

“We definitely see issues around confidence. We work with young people, and with a lot of women entrepreneurs, there's that confidence of being able to believe in scaling up. And to scale up you need to have a real confidence because you need HR systems, you need policies, procedures, all of that.

Kamran Rashid, chief executive of Impact Hub Bradford, speaks at a Business in the Community event at the social enterprise centre in Peckover Street, Bradford (Image: Reach)

“So as well as thinking about technical support that you can give to businesses. It's also about thinking about what kind of confidence or self esteem issues some of these entrepreneurs may have.”

Mr Harrison discussed recent research from professor Monder Ram, director of the Centre for Research in Ethnic Minority Entrepreneurship (CREME) at Aston University. That report said that with the right support Britain’s ehtnic minority businesses could grow their contribution to the ��Ƶ economy by £75bn.

He said Prof Ram’s report discussed three key areas - business support, leadership and collaboration.

Amanda Anderson and Clare Rudall from Business in the Community also introduced their organisation’s work

Clare said that in Bradford and Coventry, BITC was trying to work with more smaller businesses - but she said that could be a challenge due to the pressures those businesses were facing.

She said: “These business owners are spinning so many different plates, they’re time-poor. And so to expect them to take a day or a morning out is quite a big ask.”

They are also surveying businesses to find what their needs are, and are particularly working with women-owned businesses and those run by black and Asian business people.

Clare said: “We’re not just coming in and going ‘we know what you need’. We are doing quite detailed diagnostic surveys - that in itself is a challenge as that requires time out in business owners diaries’ to have that conversation. You could have to ring 10 businesses before you get that sort of agreement to have that conversation. But when you do it’s like having a critical friend.”

Later Cllr Alex Ross-Shaw, executive member for regeneration at Bradford City Council, welcomed the takforce to Bradford - and praised the city’s entrepreneurial spirit.