That adaptability, seizing those opportunities, remaining visible and investing and innovating, they are all ingredients making up a successful business.
Despite everything that went on in 2020 and all the challenges businesses have had to face, Lancashire’s scaleups have grown turnover and that is a credit to them.
Being able to
stand back from what you’re doing and
really understand the implications of the changes that you’re making, that was really beneficial for us
Lancashire as a collective has tremendous potential to grow in 2021 and beyond and to seize any opportunities that arise.
Boost has been working helping businesses to survive, assisting the business community in many ways.
Beyond that it is having ambitions. As a county council we have a £1.75bn pipeline of projects coming forward. In terms of scaleup, we are scaling up our team to make sure we have the capacity in place to take forward these projects.
How are you supported with your ambitions and what more do you need?
RF: There is fantastic funded and private support in Lancashire that you can invest in to help grow your business.
The fuel for our first three-and-a-half years of growth has been the people of Lancashire. The business community here has to be one of the most welcoming and supportive in the UK.
I’m not from Lancashire and didn’t know anybody when we started, but I wouldn’t have wanted to do this anywhere else. There’s an
old-fashioned willingness to support people, give them a leg up and help them when they’re down, but also to celebrate their success.
NB: As a growth business you keep hitting ceilings and you’ve got to break through. We’re all looking to better ourselves because it’s the only way you can grow. You need that growth mindset to be able to change and adapt when things are thrown at you.
The support in Lancashire is really good, there are various different funding pots you can dip into, there is support through mentoring, through marketing, all different things. Sometimes it’s understanding where you can find that funding when you are so busy. The community support is great.
ND: Digital transformation in terms of integration project work is one area where there could be more practical support as well as in the export space in terms of the drain on cash, particularly if you’re paying raw material suppliers and they want money in advance. On the whole, we’re very lucky to be in Lancashire for a whole host of reasons. We’ve had great peer support.
SP: Being able to tap into all the resource from the Two Zero programme and all the people that you can get access to has been fantastic for us.
There needs to be a lot more said about buying in Lancashire. Preston has led that brilliantly; it is about using suppliers in Lancashire as much as possible. Perhaps some additional support or programmes around this, to show what people are doing and what the benefits are?
SS: There is support out there, the question is what you do with it. You can get a load of advice but how do you implement it? How do you actually take the next step? It boils down to what you do with what you’ve been given. It is also spreading the word out to other people that it is here.
JW: The support has been fantastic. We now need to think about the bigger picture for the future. What other help and support are we going to give scaleup businesses within Lancashire? It’s important because the top 20 per cent of scaleups in Lancashire are going to deliver 80 per cent of the growth and recruitment.
Perhaps if there was aligned plan on procurement, leading back to the ‘let’s buy it in Lancashire’ message?
LS: Looking forward, we need more help and that is primarily funded at the moment by ourselves. We’re on a new peer-to-peer programme which is going to be superb. I feel surrounded and supported by a group of world class experts in their fields that I can dip into. Any additional support would be great. We also need to work to direct the wider business community towards the help that is out there.
RF: If you ask the question, ‘what is your biggest challenge going forward?’ it would be talent, it’s a big barrier to growth for a lot of Lancashire businesses. We need more help with personnel and skills.
Lancashire as a collective has
tremendous potential to grow in 2021 and beyond and to seize any opportunities that arise
AV: We’re looking at a couple of ideas for 2021 as we look to deliver what scaling businesses need. We’re open and receptive to ideas.
The debt market is getting saturated so we are looking at what the alternative finance market looks like, with private equity as an example. There is a low take up in Lancashire, we need to understand why and what we can do differently and better.
MG: We do touch thousands of businesses and support them in many ways, but we still only touch a fraction of the businesses. The challenge for the county council is how do we get to more? This is a great county, and we are ambitious for it to become ever better, but we can only do that by working together.
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