While plenty of local businesses are already taking advantage of our Back to Business initiative, we’ve still got room for more. So with the help of Poole Software Limited, we felt it’s time to lift the lid on what’s involved and give you some insight into a package of support that’s proving pretty useful.
If you haven’t heard about Back to Business yet, it’s funded by BCP Council through their Bounce Back Challenge Fund. We’ve designed it to offer help to SMEs across the BCP Council area and help them recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.
It’s a three-step process to assess how you’re doing across a range of business functions, highlight some areas for focus, skill up if you need to and put some actions in place to improve.
So let’s focus on step one – the GrowthMAPPER tool. It’s there to help you assess how you’re performing. It’s an online questionnaire that takes around half an hour to complete. It asks you about 8 different aspects of business and the more people you involve from across your business, the clearer a picture you’ll get of how you’re doing.
Andrei Bazanov, Managing Director of Poole Software recently completed the GrowthMAPPER exercise and quickly became a fan: “initially I was sceptical at the amount of time that might be involved, but completing the GrowthMAPPER only took around 30 minutes.”
The results map on the right shows the scores for each business area assessed. In Poole Software’s case, they’re performing well across most of the business. But sustainability hadn’t been getting attention, as Andrei explains, “It was heartening to see that we’re doing well across most of the business areas the exercise examined. But it’s clear we could be doing more around sustainability. It’s never been that we don’t want to, we fully appreciate the importance of becoming a greener business. Really it just took this exercise to point us towards it.”
With the UK hosting COP26 at the end of this month, there’s lots of help and assistance available - including the Together for Our Planet initiative for SMEs. As Andrei explained, “Those resources were a quick and simple route for us to address the areas around sustainability where we could be doing better. Dorset Gateway also pointed us in the direction of other free help – such as the Going Green event that’s part of November’s Evolve Members/BCP Council Business festival. The whole Back to Business package has really helped us focus ourselves on areas we can improve.”
To find out more and register your interest visit our Back to Business webpage.
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