RDA and Business Links – What Next?

The news that the Government will be scrapping Regional Development Agencies and the small business advice services provided through Business Link has caused a fair amount of consternation and uncertainty among business advisors and independent consultants. Not surprisingly we at Skillfair have been watching with interest and have put in our two-pennyworth on the subject. Our general stance is that small businesses should be able to choose how they access advice and that the best people to provide that advice are the independent advisor and consultant community (see our letter to Mark Prisk) rather than large organisations, whether private or public sector.

I’ve talked with a number of consultants from different parts of the UK recently and also attended a talk by an RDA representative last week. The impression I've received is that this confusion is likely to last for some time yet. The RDAs and BIS (department for Business, Innovation and Skills) are currently working on the detailed process for winding down the RDAs, something that is likely to take until early in 2012 to be fully complete. This may seem a long time but each RDA has at least 300 people to deal with and in some areas of the country they also have significant contracts with deliver companies that will need to be unwound.

So what will the result be when the process is complete? It’s hard to be clear on details but the information we have is that business start-ups will be serviced as much as possible via the web and that BIS favours using their own websites to ‘signpost’ start-ups to web resources provided by the private sector rather than delivering advice direct. Support aimed at growth businesses and other specialist support will be provided through Local Enterprise Partnerships – which it seems are likely to consist of consortia of local government organisations, the exact composition of these will vary from area to area. It seems like that these LEP’s will need to source any face to face business advice from the market so there may well be opportunities for individual advisors and groups of advisors to bid for this work – and obviously we’ll make sure that Skillfair tracks these tenders as they emerge.

What is Skillfair doing?

One of the main complaints we get from members is that we don’t get enough opportunities from the private sector, and although the level of private projects has dramatically increased since we launched the new website we feel we could do even better – particularly when it comes to attracting smaller businesses. Given the confusion in the small business advice market we think that more SMEs will be turning to the web and sites like Skillfair – so to make sure that our members get the benefit we’ll be making a number of significant additions to our service over the next few months.

SME Marketplace

The first change is that we’ll be adding an SME market to our existing Business, IT and Technology markets. This will have a much reduced set of skills focused on the core SME requirements and will be open to Accountants, Solicitors and other general business advisors. The new market will be accompanied by a revamped search facility that will allow clients to search without worrying about which market they’re in – and will also guide them to skills they’re looking for by ‘auto-filling’ the search for them rather like the search facilities on Amazon and eBay.

Existing members will be able to add a free profile to the SME market for the first year – after which they can decide whether to keep more than one profile.

Advertising

You’ll have noticed that adverts have been appearing on your daily alerts for a while – we plan to continue this and also to add a new ‘Advert Alert’ which will go out on Wednesday evenings. This alert – which will be entirely optional – will allow businesses providing services to small home based businesses like consultants to advertise their services to our consultant database and will provide another reason for small business owners to visit the site.

Small Business Site Launch

We are currently designing a new branding or 'skin' for the Skillfair website aimed solely at appealing to small business owners. This will be very simple, direct and to the point and it’s objective will be to link small businesses up as quickly and effectively as possible with advisors and consultants who can help them. The new website will exist alongside the existing Skillfair site – but using the same functionality and database so that as long as you have a profile on Skillfair, SMEs will be able to find and communicate with you – there won’t be any extra charge for appearing on the new site.

We’ll be inviting you to contribute articles and advice for small businesses to this site rather than trying to provide these ourselves, all of which will be linked back to your own profile and websites so that you benefit from the effort and exposure. We will, of course, be making sure that Skillfair and the new site feature on any government sponsored website that emerges from the coming changes and we’d appreciate your support in that and in publicising both the SME market on Skillfair and the new site when it’s ready.