Helping Small Business Grow

When I started the course it was at a stage when I was thinking of downsizing the company because I felt I couldn't cope. By not downsizing and getting that confidence to carry on, we've not only saved the jobs, but we've actually created a few new ones as well, and the turnover has gone up significantly. LEAD is a programme specifically designed to engage small businesses with higher education, in order to help them to improve the way that they are able to lead and manage and grow their businesses -- getting the business fit for growth and also to understand how to engage with innovation. The core principle of LEAD is really getting businesses to step away from the business for a while, and just work on the business rather than in the business. The LEAD course for me was quite a personal journey. We felt we were invincible. We'd had a very, very successful ten years in the 90s. We bought a dairy in South Africa. My husband went down there full-time in 2008. We struggled to some extent to find our way forward, and I struggled in particular to lead the company. There was price war going on in the supermarkets, they were putting pressure on us to take our prices down, and in the end we lost that whole chunk of business. We lost it on price, and that was a huge blow. We had to regroup and refocus, and that's when we found our way forward with lean manufacturing. So I'd been introduced to that via the university from a masterclass that I'd been on, and the two things came together and that became a template for how we ran our business. It's enormously lonely, running your own business and being an owner-manager. You're on your own, people feel on their own, and they're meant to be expert in everything. Well, you can't be an expert in everything. So if you put like-minded business-owners together, they really feel a sense of relief that it's not only them that might not understand some particular aspect of their business, but they can learn about it from each other and from different mechanisms that we can put in place. And it's like you coming in from left field, round the back and changing the rules of how things work around here! There are a number of different ways that the business can engage with the university - through masterclasses, or through action learning sets, or through just chatting over coffee with other businesses -- that bring fresh ideas into the business without it being presented in a purely academic way. It's facilitated and designed to be accessible. There was a person on the course who was just infectious with her enthusiasm for the role that small businesses play in the economy and the fact that we could do it. So it gave me that support really, but above all it gave me confidence. And every time I came away from those meetings, whether it was a masterclass or a reflection session or a shadowing session or whatever, I was energised. People say you come across people who influence your life, and she was a real influence for me. The reason that LEAD is so distinctive is because it's research-led; that insights from our research are embedded in the programmes that we design. We have business of all sizes from our research are embedded in the programmes that we design. We have business of all sizes from many sectors, we've had many manufacturing businesses, new digital IT companies, service industry as well as cheese-makers. And that diversity means that we actually enrich the learning environment for the businesses. In the nearly ten years that LEAD's been going, participants were reporting increased levels of employment, around three per cent, and increased levels of turnover, around three per cent as well. So its impact really has been on thousands of businesses to date. If you can help that engine of the economy in terms of the small businesses to thrive, you can make a real difference, have a real impact on the economy and on people's lives.