Cultivating growth

Software giant Microsoft has thrown its weight behind a government scheme to help its England-based partners double their business. Sara Yirrell digs deeper

Microsoft is not a firm normally associated with gardening, but the vendor has backed a government scheme to help small and medium-sized businesses nurture growth.

Known as the GrowthAccelerator and initially launched by business secretary Vince Cable back in 2010, the scheme represents a £200m investment in SMBs across England. There is a separate scheme for Wales and Scotland.

The programme aims to help SMBs double their size over three years and has three streams: business development, unlocking finance and access to capital, and innovation – creating new products and services.

It has a stable of experienced coaches and mentors to provide support and training to participating firms, who also help them formulate a growth plan.

To qualify, companies must have been in business for at least three years, have fewer than 250 employees and a turnover of less than £40m.

However, the scheme is not free, and requires some investment to cover the cost of the business mentors and advice.

Simon Littlewood, a director of the GrowthAccelerator programme, said it was vital that firms such as Microsoft got behind such schemes.

“This scheme is what we hope is a step change in business support for high growth potential for SMBs across the UK. It is about moving towards a more private sector model of business support.

Benefit of experience

“We realise that those businesses taking external advice will outperform the rest of the market. We have a huge amount of experience in the professional services and technology sector and our ambition is to establish a service for business growth.”

The business mentors and coaches enrolled in the scheme are typically management and senior leadership level, he explained, with many years’ experience working in their own businesses.

Littlewood said the scheme hopes to have 6,000 businesses contracted into it eventually, and at the moment about 800 are registered, with more coming on board regularly.

“We know the model works – we have quality of growth managers, quality of coaches and the feedback we get from businesses surveyed is that we are already achieving some of their key action points.”

“For us it is a point of validation that Microsoft is involved – we understand that it is not something it takes lightly, and it is also a suggestion that this sort of thing is really wanted in the marketplace.

“What we are seeing in terms of uptake gives us increasing confidence that this is a model that can be sustained within English businesses. We would encourage more of them to engage with us.”

Ali Wright, group marketing manager at Microsoft, said: “Over the past couple of years we have invested in supporting partners with a lot of training and coaching. GrowthAccelerator fitted with what we were trying to do. We want to help our partners realise their full potential and drive net-new job creation.”

She explained the software giant had created a Microsoft flavour of the programme, where special Microsoft coaches can help partners achieve their goals and support their growth aspirations.

“The scheme started as a pilot, with 100 partners expressing an interest in wanting to go through our programme. What we want, though, is to get more mainstream and we think it could be beneficial to the partner community,” she said.

Depending on the amount of training and support required and the number of employees attending courses, costs range from £600 to £3,000.

Wright said partners taking part could qualify for government grants of up to 50 per cent of the value of the training, and the vendor is offering a range of programmes of support that are tailored to partners’ business objectives.

“The good thing is partners are not signed off until they achieve their goals, so they will not get lost in the system. We are hoping to get 10 per cent of our partner base involved in this.”

And the scheme works, according to Matthew Johnson, chief executive of Microsoft channel partner Mando.

“As a business we regularly review our business plan and GrowthAccelerator was a perfect programme for us to access a coach through IncredibleResults with significant industry experience, connections and insights to help us take our business to the next level,” he said.

“The process has given us a clear growth plan, and the planning framework provided by IncredibleResults has given us a set of living and breathing tools to measure and manage our success.”