All roads lead to the Business Link

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  Name: bjn
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bjn : Growing Business
1st December 2010 9:42 AM

What did people with business aspirations do before business link?

Mostly they chewed over their ideas with their business/other colleagues then called on professional advisers such as Chartered Accountants and went on to become successful.

Most professionals will give their time freely to advise and assist in the initial stages; this is one of the traditions associated with putting something back into the community and if the business is successful work will probably flow from the initial freely given input.

Bankers, Business Angels and others cultivate relationships with professionals to find opportunities to meet with entrepreneurs and signposting to more specialised disciplines is all part of the service.

No, all roads do not necessarily lead to Business Link. Other routes have always been available and still are.

bjn

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  Name: VirtuallyMary
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VirtuallyMary : Senior Entrepreneur
2nd December 2010 8:32 AM

I'm sure I can't be the only person here who found that even Business Link itself leads to Business Link. When I was first looking into setting up the business, I phoned them and they posted me a lot of information about being a Virtual Assistant - which was lovely, but contained a lot of "look at our website" stuff. Every time I looked at the website I found I was going round and around and around in circles. More and more of the blue links were turning purple and I still wasn't finding out the stuff I needed to know.

Then Business Link advised me to hook up with a local Women's Business advice... thingy. That was possibly one of the biggest wastes of time I've ever had the misfortune to encounter. It seemed like such a good idea - don't take this badly gentlemen, but it can be slightly intimidating for a twenty-something female to try and become part of a group that is primarily males aged 35-plus who, due to the mindset that is necessary for business success, can be a bit, um, robust.

Unfortunately the forum was dead and the online business prep course was aimed entirely at Yummy Mummies - for example, here's a quote from the section about recognising transferable skills:

“Do you organise yourself, your children and your partner?
Organise the playschool

VirtuallyMary

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fredmila : Forum Member
2nd December 2010 12:01 PM

I had a meeting with a Business Link advisor and, every question I asked him, he entered it as keywords in Google in his PC. So at one point I thought "Ohhhh I did not know there was a magic box with this thing called Goggle (or something) which I could buy in a magic box shop called PC Planet and that I could do the same at home! wow!"

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sjr4x4 : Administrator
2nd December 2010 12:35 PM

Originally Posted by fredmila

“I had a meeting with a Business Link advisor and, every question I asked him, he entered it as keywords in Google in his PC...”

Dohhh, that'd annoy me

I suppose it's really down to the quality of the individual advisor, and as with any large org, standards will vary considerably. Though there do seem to be more bad than good, listening to different people

Steve Richardson
Gaffer of My Local Services
My Local Services | Me on LinkedIn

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VirtuallyMary : Senior Entrepreneur
2nd December 2010 12:40 PM

It's the risk with any kind of "advisor", you need to think about:

1) why they are working as an advisor.

Is it because they spent a long time thinking about what they really wanted to do with their life, and decided that the answer was that they wanted to use a lifetime's experience in the field of (whatever) for the benefit of others, and that the best way to do this was to do whatever it took to get a job with (organisation)?

Or is it because they were unemployed (or sick of whatever job they were doing), so they applied for everything in the paper that looked halfway interesting, didn't require concrete qualifications, and was within a commutable distance?

and

2) How they feel about their job.

Do they turn up at work every day feeling enthusiastic about helping people on the path to improving their lives? Do they jump out of the shower with shampoo in their ears so that they can jot down this fantastic idea they just had about advising? Do they go home and watch the Panorama Special about their specialist field, out of hours and unpaid, because of a true passion for the subject and the issues surrounding it?

Or are they just putting in the 9-5 in order to pay their own bills and hoping that one day, maybe, they'll get moved up to a management or consultancy role where they don't have to deal with

the public?

VirtuallyMary

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