Blackpool Skills For Success
Blackpool - Skills for Success – (2007 – 2009) This project is focused on helping established small businesses (SME’s) overcome the barriers to growth. It will enable the owners and senior managers of ‘growth wish’ businesses to enhance their ability to manage company growth by acquiring additional skills in areas that are critical to running a successful, high growth, SME. Skills For Success (SFS) fills a gap in business support; few, if any, existing business support initiatives address the development needs of established small businesses with the desire and capability to grow rapidly.
There are two main strands to Skills For Success; the Accelerator programme (click here for more information & a booking form) and a Management Development Fund. Accelerator combines workshops and individual company mentoring to enable companies to make a step change in their ability to find, win and keep customers. SFS will deliver six Accelerator programmes, involving 90 companies, over the life of the project.
The centrepiece of SFS is the Accelerator programme. This addresses perhaps the most important support need of growth wish SMEs, namely their ability to develop sales ie to find, win and keep customers. “If an entrepreneur can’t sell he can’t succeed, period.
Accelerator is a capability building programme designed specifically for growth wish SMEs
Accelerator is now a proven product. It has been delivered successfully for several other business support agencies in the North West, Yorkshire and North Wales, Oldham and Rochdale.
Accelerator is the core product of The Winning Business Academy, a collaborative venture with The University Of Manchester Incubator Company (UMIC) to enable all of UMIC’s client businesses to access Accelerator and thereby enhance their ability to grow.
Accelerator is not designed for all SMEs. Rather it has been developed for those whose growth and development can make a real difference to a local economy, those who have both the desire and the potential to grow from two or three employees to three or four times that number in a relatively short period of time.
Blackpool - Management Development Fund - is a highly flexible means of providing further support for management development in growth wish SMEs. The prime target will be those businesses that have been through the Accelerator programme and who find they have additional development needs that need to be addressed if their growth is to continue. The fund is discretionary with the maximum rate of assistance being capped at 50%. This programme will assist a minimum of 100 companies over the life of the project. (2007 – 2000).