Thursday 25 August 2011

Ten years and 30,000 consultants

This week saw us reach a significant milestone.

On Tuesday, the  30,000th consultant signed up for their 3 month guest consultant account. That's an awful lot of people through our virtual doors in our more than 10 years of operation.

That doesn't mean that we have 30,000 consultants as current members of course.

Not all guest account holders go on to become full paying members and not all full members stay with us for the rest of their natural lives (shocking but true)

The actual numbers at any time are in the 'ball park' of 1,000 full members, 1,000 on guest accounts and a further 10,000 ex-members, ex-guests, registered clients and people who have simply asked to be kept informed.  So we have around 12,000 people on our weekly email contact list and getting this newsletter.

That's quite a large community divided across corporate, engineering & technology, IT consultants and small business advisers. It's a fantastic targeted audience for members to post projects and offers to and for companies to advertise to in the weekly newsletter.

A reminder of how Skillfair works:

Every day we scan over 1,100 websites and other sources, then our UK-based analysts - led by Cath -  select and tag the best with the skills needed for the project or tender. Overnight, our system compares these with the skill-set you have entered and drops your personalised listing into your inbox around 8 am each morning. That's a lot of legwork and expert sifting being done for less than 3 pounds a week.

Members can also search for consultants with particular skills to bring in on their projects and can put their own projects and offers into the system. We also take some commercial advertising as long as it is appropriate for our audience. We also have arrangement with some public and private sector organisations to enable them to post their projects straight into Skillfair which means that many of the projects don't appear elsewhere.

People can also speak to the membership helpline which is looked after by Angela and she helps members to get the most out of the system, optimise their profiles and she gets to know the people who phone or email her regularly.  When clients put tenders and projects directly into our system, Angela gets in touch to make sure the client is genuine and at the end of the project contact period - she gets back in touch with them to find out how it went for them.

Skillfair isn't just a computerised conveyor belt then. There are real people at the heart of it who are constantly working on members behalf, looking for ways to improve the services and listening to your comments about how you would like to see things improved.

If you know anyone who ought to be getting the benefit of Skillfair, please forward this message along to them and tell them to consider signing up for a guest account to try us out.

Thursday 4 August 2011

Chips off the old blocks?

So. Will they just rebuild the 9 big sandcastles that got kicked over as a series of smaller but similar sandcastles?

What am I on about?  Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPS) of course - I shouldn't care about them, but I seem to.

The bee in my bonnet is the risk of un-thought-through obsession with so-called high growth companies.

Which comes first - the public-sector assistance or the growth?

The NESTA report  (read it here) provides figures about the often-quoted 'vital 6%' of businesses that give rise to 54% of the new jobs as providing evidence that we should be helping these companies more or less to the exclusion of all others.  I won't treat you to my broken record about how if all the silent majority of businesses with modest growth ambitions merely employed one or two extra people then it would have a massively greater uplift effect in GVA and employment than a few poster-boy projects that get in to the regional business press being photographed with some well-known local politician in the frame. I also won't rehearse the joke about the computer firm that was so successful it had to move to SMALLER premises. It was mildly amusing in the 70s when I first heard it,  the point that in the modern digital economy, growth often means a bigger server, not hiring  extra people.

Where is the research that shows the long-term prognosis for these high growth companies?  Well, here for a start ! Click to read  A Fast Track Decade

It's a short enough read for a dullard like me and makes its points succinctly. It makes the point that a sizeable number (one in five) of high growth companies aren't around a few years later - although where's the control statistic for non high growth companies over the same period? It also provides an interesting comparison between the  characteristics that make for high growth in good times (timing, strength of management) compared to what's correlated to high growth in difficult times which is differentiation through niches and innovation.

A number of other interesting points are made in the document but my real plea is that someone does some new thinking and maybe some research about whether the NESTA 6% figure still holds true, holds true across all  industry sectors and the longevity of the jobs apparently created.

In the meantime, I fear that the LEP boards may simply pick up the clothes left behind by the RDAs and cut them down to match the  new slim-line funding sources and end up doing a pale imitation of the perhaps imperfectly-targeted schemes that the RDAs were so fond of.

How about some new thinking and new research anyone?