The reward is watching young businesses prosper

There wasn’t much support around then, but thankfully now it’s a completely different story.

The one thing I learned along a difficult path is that business never fails to teach you a thing or two.

Some lessons are very hard, but with passion, dedication, sacrifice, innovation, luck and drive you can succeed.

I became involved with the York, North Yorkshire and East Riding Enterprise Partnership some six years ago, and it’s where I found a great project in the form of a Growth Hub called How’s Business.

The role is to simplify the business support landscape which from my early days in business I realised was a key element to achieve success. It was also an opportunity for me to give something back.

Our LEP covers the largest land area of any LEP where rurality is at the heart of what we do.

The challenges of distance, smaller communities, communication and resources are all very real, so there’s nothing better to hear than successful stories about real business growth.

Local lads Geoff Southgate and Carl Gehrman joined Wensleydale Brewery straight from school where they started to learn their trade. Soon after, local and regional accolades began flowing as quickly as the beer.

The opportunity arose for Geoff and Carl to buy the brewery, and after serious consideration, they took on their place of work.

With their popularity continuing to rise, Geoff and Carl realised their equipment and premises were antiquated and not up to the job.

It was then they decided to apply for £30,000 in funding from the Let’s Grow initiative. Let’s Grow grants are for businesses in the manufacturing and service sector to access capital expenditure grants ranging between £25,000 and £1,000,000 for projects that create new jobs here.

Funds are available for business expansion and diversification to help firms to expand their operations or to set up new establishments in the region.

In short it was perfect for Geoff and Carl.

As first time borrowers, it would have been very difficult for them to borrow enough to make their project possible.

The Let’s Grow grant however offered them the extra security the bank required.

The money would be used to increase production, install state-of-the-art brewing equipment and use larger premises.

In three years they hoped it would mean a rise in turnover of 25 per cent per year and to increase staff from two to five.

Not bad at all for a micro business in a rural area and music to the ears for me.

Let’s Grow would have closed in March this year had The Local Enterprise Partnership not stepped in.

Given the frequency that support initiatives come and go, we wanted to support one that typically creates one new job for every £5,000 invested.

We provided £2m in Local Growth Funding from the government, made it accessible through How’s Business and it continued to be delivered through the BE Group in partnership with Clive Owen LLP.

We are very proud of the business model we created for How’s Business.

When we set it up, we wanted to create a service that responded to business needs, rather than being supply driven, like a lot of government initiatives unfortunately can be.

Navigating the business support landscape can be particularly difficult for businesses, which is why we launched a single point of contact through How’s Business for grant programmes like Let’s Grow and the many others that are on offer.

I know that trying to make sense of public sector support is a pain. If you’re growing, you just don’t have time to scroll through Google, or call up different numbers.

That’s why we’re focused on meeting the needs of business, quickly, efficiently, and in a way you can trust.

One of my former mentees, Jen Feltham, who owns the award-winning organic skincare business Mia and Dom, described it as “your own personal Business Siri” and she couldn’t be more right.

So use it. We made it with growing businesses in mind.

Get in touch with us at [email protected].

Simplifying the landscape

When we started out, there weren’t a lot of grants to talk about.

So we had to get good at listening to people and understanding their vision to see where we could help.

Now that there’s over £27m of local funding support, we’re sticking with what we’re best at. We’re not going to tell you how to run your business, and we’re not going to parrot a list of grants at you either.

But if you’d like to tell us where you’re going with your business, we’ll listen, and when you’re done, we’ll simplify the business support landscape to present business opportunities and people you can trust.