Speaker 2 (00:00.514)
Hello everyone and welcome to the My Local Marketer podcast. I'm Maria and today I'm speaking with Steve Bulley from Berkshire Growth Hub. Steve, thank you so much for coming on. How are you?

Really good and it's fantastic to be here with you this morning.

Thank you, yes it's bright and sunny today, what's it like with you? Is it bright down there too?

It's bright and sunny here too.

Excellent. Could you please give a brief introduction to yourself and your background and what you do at Berkshire Growth Hub?

Speaker 1 (00:29.304)
So my job is to run the Berkshire Growth Hub, which is a government funded scheme. There are growth hubs across the whole of the UK, one in every county, and the government uses the growth hubs as a way to help local businesses get that personal support from local people in local communities. For me, I've come into this from a very sort of unusual angle because I spent 25 years in the world of radio. That was my job before, so I used to run radio stations.

In a bizarre way, that was helping businesses to grow because we would have, you know, small companies that would advertise with us and they would advertise to grow their business. So bizarrely, when you kind of look at the journey, it's not quite so weird as it first seems going from running radio stations to running business support because it in the same way, it's the kind of same thing. When the business was sold to a national group about eight years ago, I moved into business support and I've been looking after the Berkshire team for just under two years now.

You still do bits in the local radio though, don't you?

I do it now as a volunteer, yeah. So as you sort of know, if you do a job that you're paid for and then you do it as a volunteer, it's a very different experience because I don't actually have to do it now, but I choose to do it.

which makes it a lot more fun. So as well as obviously having the radio that you still do now and running the Berkshire Growth Hub, what else do you do? Is there anything else that you do on the side?

Speaker 1 (01:43.755)
Definitely.

Speaker 1 (01:54.2)
So I'm a volunteer at a steam railway. So I volunteer twice a month walking up and down the train collecting tickets. So I'm a ticket collector and we literally dress up in a 1950s look, you know, with the dark suit and the pocket watch and the hat. So yeah, that's, which is something really fun. And I love that because it's great to see the multi-generational part of that. You you see grandparents who are bringing their grandkids because they bought their kids. And it's also a lot of

very, very young children. It's just something very alien because we live in a very digital world. So to see something that effectively, know, steam engine is a living beast. You know, it has a soul, it is alive. I genuinely believe that. people are just absolutely still amazed by the fact that we are running these engines that are, in one case, nearly 100 years old, up and down a seven mile track in Dorset.

For Berkshire Growth Hub, what is its core mission?

So the Growth Hubs, and as I said, there's 41 across the UK, we're funded by the government. And the idea is, effectively, we are GPs for business. So, you you go to your GP and your GP will identify what the problem is. The GP doesn't always solve that problem. Sometimes it does. Sometimes the GP will say, look, here's an easy fix. Other times the GP will say, actually, you need to speak to a specialist. So that's what we do, but for businesses. And we're free at the point of

need, so just like your GP is. But we are there to talk to any business. So it could be someone that is bewildered about starting a business. know, lot of people at a certain point in their life decide to start a business. And that can be a very bewildering start because where do you start? So we help those people right the way up to businesses that are scaling. You know, they've got to that point where they've grown and grown and grown and they've got to make a decision. What do we do next?

Speaker 1 (03:53.848)
You know, where do we invest? What people do we need to take this business to the next level? And interestingly as well, also more and more now around exiting, because business owners are often talking to us about how do I exit my business? Do I do an employee sale? Do I sell to a competitor? Do I just wind it up? In many cases, businesses that would have originally been family businesses passed down to generation to generation, that does happen less because

quite often the next generation are more excited about something very different and have got their own career path and I don't think it's not expected anymore. So I always say to people think of us as a GP for your business. Ask us anything, matter what it is, we will either be able to help you or we will point in the right direction where you can get that support.

really like that phrasing and it's very clear then that you help businesses at all stages which is great. You're government funded so people don't need to be a member, they can just give you a call if they need any help. So could you go into bit more detail and do the range of services? Obviously if people got a problem they can call you. What else do you offer businesses?

So we actually, in terms of startup, we run a startup course. We run that every month, which is over two sessions, six hours. And that literally is everything you need to know about starting your business. know, making sure that you've got a business plan, a marketing plan, you understand that your business is going to make some money because quite often people don't really add in all their costs, the number of businesses and people that we speak to. And we look at their sort of business forecast and we go, but where's the pay for you?

yeah, but I'm no, no, no, no, you've got to pay several ways. So where's the pay for you? And sometimes it's little things like that. Understand the implications of insurance because certainly if you've moved from maybe like a hobby business into a real business, you've got to start to think about those kinds of things. So that's something that's really very popular and we run that monthly. We also do sort of master classes at lunchtime on very specific topics. So

Speaker 1 (05:57.496)
There's lots of general information out there and that's great and there's a place for that. So one of the things that we looked at at the beginning of this year was why don't we do shorter sessions, but very specific. So we recently did one on using video that doesn't make you cringe because video is the new way that businesses communicate. And I think from our perspective, by just doing that sort of hour, just on that one topic, really helped those people that attended.

We're doing those on TikTok and on Instagram. So won't be for everybody, but what it means is there's no wastage. We know time is really precious. And so you're not sat in two hours where actually only half an hour is applicable to you. So that's the way that we've moved this year. And we also link into the education side of business improvements. So we link into skills boot camps. So there are schools boot camps available in Barch here.

anything from data analytics to leadership and management to sales to AI and the list goes on. So we hopefully have something for everybody. And I always say that, you know, if you're not learning something new in business every single day, then you've done something wrong.

Do you have a library of resources, for example? What if people need templates for NDAs or statements of work contracts? Do you have that as well that people can look at?

We do. Yeah, we have some of that. We have to be a little bit careful sometimes with contractual documentation because it needs to be very updated. And so sometimes we will say, look, you you probably ought to speak to a specialist to make sure that you've got all the relevant, you know, if we look at the moment with employment contracts, you know, with the new laws coming in, something that was created six months ago is at a date. And this is where I go back to sort of being a GP. If we've got some resources, we will share them.

Speaker 1 (07:49.506)
But if we haven't, what we'll do is say, look, what you probably need to do is to contact a specialist and get that done. Or you can, you know, here's some areas where you can download them. There's some organizations you can join that will give you a suite of those documents, but basic business plans, cost analysis, all that sort of stuff. have all of that on the shelf resilience plans, that sort of thing. It's only areas where there's probably a legal complication where we would be advising people to get the appropriate advice.

That is so helpful for businesses. And how do you decide what services to offer? For example, you said that the conversation of exiting is coming up more and more. Do your offerings change according to patterns that you're noticing?

Yeah, I think because we're funded in the way that we are, and also we talked to a lot of businesses, we spoke to over a thousand last year, we can see the common questions that are coming up and we can see that change in the business landscape. And we're very lucky that the Department for Business and Trade, who fund us from the government, allow us to have that flexibility. So just because we might start off saying, actually this is really important. And if you go back for us about 18 months,

Leadership and management was a really big thing. Everyone was talking about it. It was the kind of the go-to thing that everyone wanted to do. And we've seen that wane over time and other things come in. So people want to understand a lot more about their marketing because their budget is quite tight and they want to make sure that they know they're getting the ROI on it. Also, we've seen a lot around sales. We've seen a lot around obviously introduction of AI and adoption of AI because if you're not adopting AI into your business, you're already behind the curve.

So a lot of that is based on feedback that we hear. We have what we call in our weekly meetings our bake session, which is business advisors knowledge exchange. So we have a little bake off every week and that's a really useful way of us as a team kind of saying this is what we're hearing from our clients and then we can see any common themes. And if necessary, we'll put on something specifically around that if we believe it's important.

Speaker 2 (09:58.19)
That's really helpful. What patterns have you noticed then? You went into a little bit of detail there with leadership being a common one for 18 months ago and now the focus is more on AI and marketing. Could you go into a bit more depth as to patterns that you've seen talking to business owners?

It's interesting because one of the things that we do is obviously we cover not only just Reading but the whole of the area. there are commonalities across the whole of Berkshire. I mean, obviously Reading is driven very much by tech businesses, hence the Reading tech cluster, which we work very closely with. But what we tend to find is when it comes to the core thing that people speak to us, over 80 % of businesses want to make more money.

That's the bottom line, you know, and there's all sorts of fluff and they say in all sorts of lovely ways and, you know, we're very polite as the British, we should be more American, I think at times, and just say it as it is. But that's the bottom line is that businesses come to us because they need more money. They need help to get that more money. A lot of people think that's down to marketing. But interestingly, what we've found and discovered is that

actually it's much more about sales. And people put sales and marketing in the same boat and they're not, they're very different things. But actually, you know, someone could speak to an expert like yourself on marketing and have the best marketing plan. They could spend thousands of pounds on marketing their business. But if when they're sat with a customer, whether it be online or in person, and they don't close and ask for the business, all that money is wasted. Because we all know

Someone very, very wise said to me, very early in my business career, that when someone says yes, it's a maybe. The only yes is, when will you send me the invoice? How can I pay? Here's my credit card details. That's yes. A yes, I'll come back to you. Yeah, I'll think about that. Yeah, that's fine. Just send me the information on an email and I'll get it sorted. That's a maybe. Because if someone wants to buy from you, they'll buy from you immediately.

Speaker 1 (12:09.526)
If you go into a car showroom and you see your perfect car, it's the car that you dreamed about, you don't go, well I'll think about it and come back to you. You go, I want that car, here's a deposit.

I am so pleased you said that. This has been a B in my bonnet for years. The fact that sales and marketing is lumped together in the same department. And marketing for me, it seems to be classed an extension of sales. So for me, marketing's about knowing the audience, what do they need, fulfilling their needs, making your business attractive to attract the right people. That for me is marketing. But actually the conversations I have generally in businesses is how many leads do we have this month?

How many leads do we have this month? So you focus more on like the sales part and actually trying to close things, then the marketing part of getting to know your audience. So thank you for saying that.

No, it's very true. know, we are as a nation, we're very polite and, you know, we're very reserved and we're not always comfortable asking for business. It feels a bit uncomfortable sometimes, but there are some lovely ways of asking for business without being in someone's face. I worked with an Australian gentleman on a sales promotion that we did when I was running the radio stations. And I'll never forget, he had this lovely way of what I will call closing a sale.

and that literally was you'd say, can I count you in? Not aggressive, it's very subtle, it's, you know. And then you either get the, yeah, let me sign, or you get your maybe, yes.

Speaker 2 (13:43.01)
So would you say then that, as you said, sales, trying to close the sale, get more business in, thinking about common challenges across box business owners, that is just the top one. You don't really have.

I think more and more small businesses are owner run and owner led. Yeah. And if you and I walk down Reading High Street in the next 10 minutes and we asked 10 business people, you know, before you set up your business, you know, did you do sales? We'd be lucky if one in 10 said yes. Because when you work for a bigger company, you have a department that does that. And then all of a sudden you're working for yourself and you've got to do it.

And we're not all natural salespeople. We've all got a salesperson in us, but we're not natural salespeople. Not everyone is. So our job is to encourage people just to use the skills they've got to be better. And sometimes it is literally as basic of, you know, how many people are listening right now in the last week have been on an appointment with a new customer.

and not asked for the business. We've let them think about whether they want to do business with us rather than say, you know, I've looked at what your issues are, I've understood them, you've agreed that we've understood them, so let's do business.

And again, this is really interesting because you're absolutely right. People who want to do a business around something is because they love or they like the idea of that one thing, whether it's selling coffee or making a product or doing something. But in order to do that, you have to do the marketing, you have to do the sales, you have to know your finances, you have to have a strong business plan in place. And I know people normally say marketing is a problem or, you know, sales is a problem, but actually if you don't have a good offering.

Speaker 2 (15:36.76)
then it doesn't matter how good a salesperson you are, if you're offering, it's just not suitable the person you're trying to sell it to. So you have to have half a dozen different things properly lined up in order to attract the right people, keep them in your ecosystem and take them through, which is really difficult. And you are not taught anything like that at school.

No, and I think as well, it's a tough business. I think lost to my looks, there were over 20,000 roles available in the Berkshire area, which had sales in the title. It's really interesting now, if you see job adverts, they don't tend to mention sales often. They'll sort of try and fluff it up in business development. And, but the reality is actually what they want is they want more business coming in. And I think that goes from whether it be a small business to a very large business, you know, ultimately large businesses rely on big contracts. That's a long lead in time.

You've got to make sure your cash flow is right. You've got to make sure that you've got the reserves to work on sometimes three, four, five, six months. We're seeing feedback we get from larger businesses that we're dealing with at the moment where quite often, know, contracts are out, as they say, for maybe two or three months before they're signed off because there's a hesitancy within the supply chain to commit. And that's a problem if you don't have the cash flow to get yourself through that period of time.

Because if you've assumed you're going to get that in the first month, and you're not going to get it for four months. So everything's got a longer lead in time. So it doesn't just affect the smaller businesses, but the larger businesses it affects in a very different way. Because even though they might have brilliant people that work for them, that are delivering those sales, the issue for them is when they're actually going to come in, when are we actually going to get paid, and how are we going to pay our bills between that time.

in terms of cash flow, because we all know in business cash is king.

Speaker 2 (17:25.826)
How do you measure the success of Berkshire Growth Hub? Because obviously you must have targets, you need to measure the impact you're having in the area, how you're helping business owners, so how do you do that?

So we've got obviously KPIs as you'd imagine from the government. The government don't give out our taxpayers money without wanting to know what we're spending it on. So we've got KPIs that come in. We're quite lucky we're able to work with them to set some of those because obviously geographically areas are very different. So you'd expect probably the kind of business support that's delivered in an area like Berkshire, part of the Thames Valley would be very different maybe than it is in Cornwall.

where they've got a much bigger reliance on hospitality businesses, et cetera. So there's flexibility. And from our perspective, what we work on is we also work on outcomes because that's what excites me and the team. What are the outcomes? What is it that we've actually achieved? Because it's all in good helping 1,000 businesses, but what difference have we made? So for us, we also go back after normally three or six months to anyone that we've helped and find out.

what that outcome has been. You know, have they actually been able to hire somebody that a full or part-time person? Have they launched that new product? Have they expanded? Have they taken on a second premises? In some cases, have they spoken to a competitor and merged? Have they done some sort of collaboration? And that is where I think myself and the team get much more pleasure because they are the identifiable things that have made a difference in the area. We know that that has actually

made a difference to that business. And in some cases, we speak to them and they go, know what, we tried it, it didn't work and we've gone back to do something different. And I don't see that as a failure because if we've helped someone to see that actually the business idea that they had, that all their friends and family told them were brilliant because they don't want to upset them, but we've been able to say confidentially, really, where's the profit in this? And they've actually understood that.

Speaker 1 (19:28.078)
they're not going to make the kind of money that they want and so therefore they need to make a decision either to close it, sell it, merge it or do something completely different. So for us that's the key thing and in the last couple of years we've created over 50 new jobs and we all know that that puts in a fairly huge amount of money into the economy and around 48, 49 new products or services have been launched and since we've been going we've probably protected the best part of 1500 jobs in

in Berkshire because one of the other things we do is protect jobs. It's not all about creating them because quite often we will enable businesses to be able to do things in a different way, more efficiently and therefore protect jobs that they might be coming to us going, we're thinking of, you know, we need to lose three people because we can't make all this add up.

So how do you manage to gather the data for those outcomes? Because it sounds like it's something that businesses will actively have to come and tell you. Do you follow up with them? Do you send out a survey after three months? How do you do it?

So we do, we survey all the time. So we're always asking for feedback because we have to, because we, you know, we need to know what we're doing is right. And then normally after between three and six months, we'll go back and just have a follow-up call and just say, you know, Hey, how's it going? Do you need anything else? Cause also sometimes at that time, so six months in, it might well be that by that time they've got some other issues that they need to talk through. So, you know, we're almost going out and saying,

You know, if you need some more help now, here we are. Just don't forget us. But it does rely on the business listening to what we've advised and doing something about it. You know, there will always be some where they're totally fixed on what they want to do. And that's what they're going to do. And success or failure will be down to them. But most businesses, when they talk to one of the team, because it's all confidential,

Speaker 1 (21:26.178)
We've got no axe to grind, we've got no political allegiances. Yes, we're funded by the government, but that's it. Most people find that we're able to offer a real insight into where they are with their business that quite often no one else has ever said to them.

We've talked about a wide variety of things today. Is there something that we've not mentioned related to Berkshire growth herb or something interesting that you think would be good to mention?

Because we're government funded, one of the things that we have to be careful with is obviously it's taxpayers money paying for this service. So we have to make sure that we're investing as much of that as possible in the team. So we've got four people, advisors, they're part-time. They hate it when I say this, but if you put me in there as well, there's about 200 years worth of experience in there for all of us, if not a tad more.

So we don't have a huge marketing budget. In fact, we have quite a limited marketing budget. And that's right. You know, why would you as a taxpayer want me to spend a huge percentage on books, pens, flags, whatever it may be. So we're very, very reliant on word of mouth and doing things like our discussion this morning, Maria, in terms of people understanding what we do. It's difficult. I would love to be able to have, you know, huge, great big campaigns and bits and pieces.

but we know that that's not brilliant use of the money. So we have to be very careful what we do. So I guess the key thing, hopefully from today is that even if people don't believe that they need us, if they know that we exist, next time they're talking to somebody who says, I'm really struggling with this, they'll go, did you know about the Berkshire Growth Hub? And I go to expos and I say to people, Berkshire Growth Hub, and you get two answers.

Speaker 1 (23:14.774)
You either get the honest answer, which is no. Will you get that? Yeah, I think I might have heard of you, but what is it you do again?

back of that, how can interested business owners find out more?

So it's really easy. BerkshireGrowthHub.co.uk is our website, which has got everything that you need. So that shows the sort of four pillars, because the other pillar we've not talked about is funding. can also, we have access to startup loans, also business loans, and also the Berkshire funding escalator. So that's on our website too. And of course, as you'd expect, we're on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.

Perfect! And a thing that you'd like to leave our listeners with today Steve.

I think one of the things that one of our businesses said to me once when I bumped into them at an expo was that talking to us made them not have as many sleepless nights because they were worrying about things. And you know, if someone's listening to this and they've had a sleepless night because they're worrying about their business, then please, please get in touch because we're here to listen, to understand, to offer insights.

Speaker 1 (24:25.134)
So anyone that you speak to, if they're struggling, they don't need to struggle alone. We are here to help them. And that's, think, a really key message I'd like to get across today. And I think the final thing I'd say as well is, and this goes back to some of our conversation earlier, is that if you've got an appointment today with a potential customer, don't forget to ask for the business.

Steve, I think that's a lovely way to leave people. Thank you so much for your time this morning. I really appreciate it. And yes, everyone listening to this, please tell everyone about Berkshire Growth Hub.