With business growth a national priority, local business support will continue to play a crucial part in building a resilient economic future. But, at the same time they are being asked to do more with less. Whether you part of a Growth Hub, LEP, local government authority, business school or trade association, you can modernise your business advice service and increase ROI by basing your support on the right business diagnostic platform. Below, we outline a few of the many benefits a robust and flexible diagnostic platform can provide local business support.
1/ Rigorous and meaningful inputs. Local business support often still relies on ineffective and outdated diagnostic approaches. Without robust diagnostic tool, organisations and individual advisors use their own methods, often not underpinned by objective or in-depth data, which results in a less accurate and insightful analysis. So, after investing valuable time and effort, those businesses do not have a clear analysis of their current at the end of the process. Backed by data, effective business diagnostics quickly and efficiently develops an overall understanding of a business to accurately pinpoint areas for improvement. This includes insights about their business that they didn’t already know, rather than simply reflecting back information provided by them.
2/ Identifying businesses with the highest growth potential. Business support effort needs to focus on the businesses with the greatest potential to impact their local economy – and it’s important to find those businesses quickly to make the best use of resources. Instead of using blunt assessment criteria like number of employees and turnover, a Growth Segmentation tool offers a nuanced analysis that assesses current growth performance and future potential in a few minutes, using front-of-mind information.
3/ Focus on future potential. By assessing both current performance and future growth potential, business support can stay focused on transformational advice, rather than being reactive and putting too much time and effort into solving shorter-term issues that don’t contribute to the long-term growth of the business. Benchmarking is also an excellent method of tracking a business’s performance over time.
4/ A Clear, Consistent, Standardised Approach. A business diagnostic platform helps organise access to business support and standardises the approach across the support organisation, removing confusion through intelligent signposting based on the real needs of businesses. As it is client-facing, it should also be clear, professional and help to engage businesses in the process, offering a consistent customer experience for all.
5/ Eliminate Diagnosis Fatigue. Businesses that receive support are often over-diagnosed, with each support organisation collecting similar information from the same business rather than building on what’s already been gathered. The right diagnostic platform provides a single customer view for all partners – eliminating duplication which can, understandably, create frustration for the client. Any new data simply adds to the business profile already created.
6/ Flexibility and Customisation. The right business diagnostic platform provides flexibility to its users - covering a variety of operational areas, themes, sectors and views of the business on one, easy to use platform. Not only does that reduce the amount of advisor training needed, it is also much more cost effective to use multiple tools from a single platform. You should be able to customise existing tools or create new ones when the need arises, working with a team that is both approachable and responsive.
7/ Aggregate nationwide data. Currently there is no single point for business support data collection across the 38 LEPs, Growth Hubs and local government authority areas in the UK - leaving all the rich, publicly funded data untapped. An effective platform aggregates enterprise data into one system, allowing all areas to benefit from it by providing comparison to inform better decisions and support for all.
To be clear, data-driven solutions are not an alternative to personal, one-to-one advice delivered by experienced professionals. Expertise, professional relationships and accountability are the most effective means to deliver business support. Business diagnostic platforms are designed to provide tools that make their advice more efficient and objective, and provide a professional, joined-up approach across the support organisation. A robust, proven data-driven platform, along with the experience of effective advisors, create more impact and real insight for the businesses you support.
For more than 25 years, Winning Moves has provided high quality benchmarking and business diagnostic tools to local business support providers through its Benchmark Index service. Powerful, data-driven, flexible and easy to use, it has produced real results in more than 45 countries on five continents (and made in the UK).
If you’re interested in learning more, you can call Programme Director, Mark Modena, at 0121 285 3800 or 07595 821979, or email him at marka@winningmoves.com. You can also find out more by browsing this website. We suggest you start with the BI Support page, here: https://www.benchmarkindex.com/bi-products/bi-support-platform.