Thinking about Small Business Growth

Well, for me the question is – what is Growth? I’d agree on the macro points about education and encouraging entrepreneurship. I’d also agree about considering the tax implications on small business owners. But, I’m not too sure about the investment in Public Sector Jobs.

It’s a bit of a philosophical conundrum for me – What is Growth?

What I’d like to see is diversity in the Small Business Sector with support from central government agencies – back to the old high street ways – where relationships counted. This could encourage strong regional diversity of businesses – and with many diversified businesses the overall outcome would be growth. Perhaps we need to be tackling growth from this Regional point of view rather than from the point of view of which individual businesses or sectors will grow.

A clear Regional strategy which encouraged diversity and a preponderance of small businesses would through it’s very supportive environment ultimately generate some ‘growth’ businesses; but still growth within the economy – (which is as good a measure of growth as any) could still be achieved.

But on a micro level – the reason there are so many small business that don’t grow, is because they’re happy like that. What makes a business grow? Well, rather like a garden, growth has to be tended. It takes time and consideration and often times the market doesn’t allow us to build the relationships necessary for growth.

Growth has the potential to corrupt on many levels – which is why we have legislation in place to manage business practices. So when you grow your business, you are changing it fundamentally. Unless of course you’ve started off with the big business mentality and have structured something from the outset which is to grow

So, rather than trying to grow individual businesses – Regional Strategy, supported by government macro policy to support a diversified small business base could bring back to the Region, not only growth – but an interesting diversity of regionalism. Decentralising, de-monopolising, de-globaling – if these are indeed words, are maybe part of what we should be looking at as part of our growth strategies.

If small businesses support small businesses, and central government supports the small business environment, we can and will grow out of recession, and even the fact that so many small firms don’t actually grow, would be a boon to this sector overall. As Sue has identified, many ‘small businesses will also be sustainable and profitable over time as they have a secure customer and supplier base which works well at the micro level’ - so they are already making an invaluable contribution to this potential strategy.

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My name is Janet Green, my company is DOC Solar and Electrical. I am a participant in the MMU Growth Programme. My background is – I graduated in 1999 with a BA in business admin from LJMU as a mature student and entered the workforce full time for the first time in many years then, making the transition to our family business full time in January 2010.

I have taken our company from Electrical Installation into Sustainable Energy and am driving through our business development of the Environmental sector – keen to make us a well recognised and established deliverer of Renewable Technology in the North West.