9:00am Thursday 15th July 2010
By Andrew Smith
The choice for the ngage team was clear — wind up completely, or continue what they were doing on a reduced scale, while also finding new directions.
Many will not be aware of what ngage is, but mention the fact that this was the organisation which ran the old Milton Keynes, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Business Link and the penny will drop.
That choice involved what to do when it narrowly lost the tender to run the new enlarged Business Link for the South East to Serco.
Without its major contract worth £4m a year, it would have been easy just to wind up the organisation completely.
But some of its partners, including Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire County Councils, the Oxfordshire Economic Partnership, Buckinghamshire Economic Learning Partnership, and the Thames Valley Chamber of Commerce, thought differently.
Chairman Bob Langton explained: “We lost the bid last July and our contract ran until March 31 this year.
“Whatever happened, there would be some ongoing business to deal with and if we didn’t deliver it, then we would have to find someone who would.
“So we decided to carry on to try and add value to the businesses on our patch.”
Raising awareness has been a key task as ngage sat behind the scenes with Business Link, the recognised brand. Now it has to be upfront to deliver a range of programmes and services.
For example, it oversees the delivery of £4.8m worth of Leader funding for farmers, foresters and other small rural businesses and community groups, which has been provided by the South East England Development Agency (SEEDA) and the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs through the European Agricultural Fund.
The difference from the Business Link service is that this funding is specifically targeted and comes from different areas with £500,000 of grants awarded to 27 businesses so far.
European funding is also important to the development of many businesses and ngage is involved with the Sustainable Routes programme, which arranges match-funding of up to £1,000 to help firms reduce the cost of business travel and cut carbon emissions. Part of the funding for this initiative has come from the European Regional Development Fund.
But as well as acting as a conduit for funding, ngage decided to look at what else it could do.
Over the course of nine years running Business Link, the board realised it had built up considerable expertise in back office support services, and decided to offer this expertise to small businesses and other organisations, such as charities, which fit well with ngage’s shareholders and not-for-profit structure.
So now it can offer marketing and consultancy services, bid writing, research and evaluations, as well as helping with grants and obtaining funding.
The aim is to free clients from worrying about administration, allowing them to focus on developing their business.
The majority of the staff who can provide these services are based at the ngage offices in Thame (a couple of doors down from Business Link, where it used to be based) and a network of associates is also being developed to build the service further.
As for the structure of the organisation, ngage appointed Philippa Batting to be its managing director. Ms Batting was previously head of finance and a board director at ngage, and has also worked at Stoke Mandeville Hospital Charitable Trust and Bucks County Council.
The board consists of Huw Jones from Oxfordshire County Council; Neil Gibson from Buckinghamshire County Council; Graeme Finch, a former chief executive of Business Link; Mr Langton, representing the Oxfordshire Economic Partnership; Howard Machin of the Thames Valley Chamber of Commerce and serial entrepreneur Mike Reilly from Milton Keynes.
And it has been a successful start with customers signed up from day one. Projected turnover in 2010-11 is £1.5m, with break-even at the end of year one, while the organisation has cash reserves of about £500,000 which will be used accordingly in the local economy.
As for cuts in public sector funding, this is seen as an opportunity by ngage.
Ms Batting said: “We will be able to put services back into some areas, such as county councils. What ngage is good at is arranging an income from Europe and getting the right partnership together.”
Name: ngage Established: 2001 Managing director: Philippa Batting Number of staff: 20 Annual turnover: £1.5m (projected)
Contact: 01844 210400 Web: www.ngagesolutions.co.uk
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