After 10 successful years supporting start-up and small businesses with growth aspirations across England, Cavendish Enterprise is relaunching as Start and Grow UK.
Although the name Cavendish Enterprise is well-established, it doesn’t tell new partners or customers anything about our services or the markets we work in. Adopting the name Start and Grow UK will make our role clear.
Start and Grow UK is a partnership company that specialises in working with government and large organisations who want to strengthen the small firms sector in England. We do this by helping people to start new businesses, to grow them in scale and in levels of productivity, and to help them to become more resilient.
We work together as a partnership that brings together leading enterprise support providers from across the country: Business West, Enterprise First, NBV/NWES and TEDCO. We have close partnerships with the University of Lancaster (LUMS) in service delivery and Warwick (WBS) in research. We have also had major partnership working relationships with private sector organisations such as Barclays Bank and Virgin Start-up.
We have been working with BEIS for a decade now, running large-scale support programmes across the country and, also, small-scale trials to make as sure as possible that public money is going to be well-spent before scaling up the investments.
The external evaluation of our last large-scale programme, Start and Grow, has just reported 3-year business survival rates of 63.8% for programme participants, a full 8% higher than the national average for the same period.
Since 2012, through Start and Grow, and its predecessor Ready for Business, over 30,000 people have explored the idea of running a business, over 8,500 have converted their curiosity into a new enterprise, creating over 15,000 jobs in the process. This has been achieved in the more disadvantaged parts of every English region.
In the last three years, we have been at the forefront of working with BEIS to test policy interventions in small business, especially those relating to productivity improvement, through the Business Basics Fund. We are delighted to be able to launch the first research report associated with the Business Basics Fund for our project Business Boost, a successful trial that we are urging the Government to scale up.
We would also like to make you aware of our new website where you can find out about the details of the Business Boost trial and more about Start and Grow UK.
In the next few months we’ll be able to share the full evaluation report into the Start and Grow programme and provide a progress report on the latest Business Basics Fund trial.
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