1066 Enterprise – Jeremy Green introduces…

                        Battle Chamber of Commerce – meeting 20/7/09.

 

 

What Ten Sixty Six is – i.e. the Enterprise Agency, HACC and Town Centre Manager for Hastings and St Leonards on Sea. We also have a Loan Fund – Capitalise Business Support – designed to provide loans for businesses, which are unable to access funding through the high street banks.

 

Private Company – owned by its members – we do work for Battle Chamber with Administrative back up etc. We have done “4 Chambers” activities in the past.

 

Core business is Business Advice. See leaflet in pack. The core business is business advice to pre-start, start up and established businesses.

 

Our funding comes from having agreements with Hastings and Rother Councils – we could be said to act as their “economic development” office – so if you look at either of their websites, you will see reference to us in the business sections.

 

Business Advice around the piece is confusing – as there are a lot of people seemingly doing the same thing, and so my message really is to please use us as your first point of contact to answer your questions from time to time. See Business Support Matrix.

 

Just a summary – there is:

• Sussex Enterprise or also Business Link Sussex – the County Wide Enterprise Agency for the County of Sussex.
• Business link is the UK Government’s badge for business advice and we at TSSE are accredited Business Link advisors.
• In East Sussex there is EDEAL in Eastbourne and Wealden and TSSE in Hastings and Rother.

 

 

What can we do for you?

 

It is often said that “Hastings gets all the money” and to a certain extent this is true, due to the IMD scores in the town.

 

In any economic climate, Government funding is inevitably limited – and usually for specific purposes, and usually the funding is targeted at getting support to businesses, which the business does not have to pay.

 

So as we are the Enterprise Agency for Rother as well as Hastings we can offer:

 

1. Advice support and guidance to your business in a specific topic that puzzles you or you need support with it.
2. As we are Business Link Advisors – we are able to access for you (or you can do it yourself) a Small Business Review, which can be a review of your business journey and where your business is – which will produce some specific actions for the business to take forward. This is entirely free to the business and takes about 2 hours, to include a financial review. This is funded by Business Link but ESCC added £100,000 to this last year to increase the level of support to East Sussex Businesses.
3. We do continue to provide a regular training programme of short courses, see brochure, on the usual set of necessary skills, for instance First Aid, Health and Safety, IT courses, Employment Law and Accounting skills. All the dates for 2009 are on our website, and booking can be made online.
4. We have reached agreement with Rother D C that in the 2009 – 10 year we will focus on Rural Shops and Post Offices, given the difficult times that that sector faces, to get a Business Review done, and to provide up to 5 hours of free mentoring time to help put actions in place.
5. As part of the training function – if any business or group of businesses wish to have specific training – we are delighted to speak to them and to try to arrange a bespoke course.
6. We are always happy to talk to establish the contact with the business and this can be for at least an hour and then we could agree a way forward – which might be funded, or it might be “private” mentoring – which would inevitably involve some sort of payment from the business.
7. We have just introduced a new service – Accept Cards – a way of any business that takes payment by plastic to get a free consultancy review of the charges for these cards and to find the lowest provider.

 

 

Funding.

 

All business want a grant – but in any economic climate – there is very limited funding. In 2009, this climate is tightening, and it remains that the main source of funding is either private capital or bank borrowing. As part of the advice we can offer as above, we can help you get a package together to discuss funding with your bankers.

 

There is very little Grant Funding – but what there is is laid out on the Finance South East Website www.financesoutheast.co.uk

 

There are a number of grants focussed on Research and Development – Grants for R&D.

 

There is the Grant For Business Investment – 20% min £10,000 – so CAPEX is £50,000 min: but there must be demonstrable Regional and National benefit, and so whilst local businesses may be excellent businesses they do provide a local service and therefore are unlikely to present a strong case for this grant.

 

There is the WARR Partnership – with EU funding – and I can only suggest you see their website for information, and if you would like us to talk with you about this then we can: we are speaking to at least three businesses about their application, and turned one declined Expression of Interest into a potential grant proposition.

 

I mentioned the Loan Fund – Capitalise Business Support is a Community Development Finance Initiative – and designed to provide loan finance for those businesses who cannot access the funding required from their bankers, and part of the loan arrangement is the provision of business mentoring for the duration of the loan.

 

The Ten Sixty Six Price List I have brought gives a neat summary of the sort of things we can offer, but the message remains – it is good to talk and we are happy to talk to individual businesses, and we will not simply try to put people in boxes, but will find ways of supporting the business through the many contracts we have.

 

Other.

 

We also do a number of things –

 

·         We organise Lets do Business in Hastings and now also in Eastbourne, on behalf of the Eastbourne and District Chamber of Commerce, the Hastings event is for all business in Hastings and Rother and sees in excess if 1,200 visitors attend on the day – 12^th November 2009.

·         We organise the 1066 Business Awards in March each year – a chance for all businesses to celebrate their successes and to get recognition for that: and this attracts significant coverage with the media partner T R Beckett & Co.

·         We sit on a number of Partnerships, e.g. The Battle Partnership, and the WARR Partnership, as well as the Local Strategic Partnership.