Brexit Blog: Planning for Risk
Melanie Redding, an Enterprise M3 Growth Hub Associate Growth Champion offers practical advice in the face of Brexit uncertainty
With 29 March looming, it would not be surprising to hear that many of our businesses in Hampshire and Surrey are feeling the pressure of uncertainty. Instead of more information, we’d like to offer some practical help.
Government is already in regular dialogue with big business, pushing out streams of information in the form of webinars, hyperlinks to various departmental Brexit data and presentations from Brexit events… but sadly much of this has passed by many of the Small to Medium Enterprises in the EM3 area and elsewhere in the UK with little impact to date.
We hear first hand that many of these businesses are simply feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information available and cannot easily distinguish between what is useful and relevant – and what is essentially a digression from the everyday pressures of running their business, generating sales and cash flow.
This is where the Enterprise M3 Growth Hub can provide practical help. We were set up by Government to reach out and provide practical support to SMEs in our region. Essentially companies can receive 2 days of FREE management consultancy – which is delivered by independent experts in their fields. These advisers are not career civil servants but experienced veterans from a range of industry sectors, such as: defence, logistics, pharmaceuticals, ICT/ AI/ cyber.
The Growth Hub not only provides a helpline and direct access to these experts, it has established a single website which SMEs can use, to access relevant information from a variety of sources about Brexit, without having to consult multiple sources.
Our Growth Hub advisers are focused on helping small to medium businesses identify what risks they genuinely face and what action is open to them. One area, for example, is looking at a company’s supply chain and identifying the dependencies which may be significantly impacted by Brexit but have not been mitigated (e.g. sourcing a critical part for a customer project from a European supplier which then becomes stuck in customs).
Another area of significant risk is managing the sales pipeline to ensure the business development strategy is not affected by losses associated with Brexit (e.g. dependency for future funding based on a customer base that then disappears or fades).
The Growth Hub has its own established network of technical specialists (e.g. legal GDPR; HR and immigration; customs and import/ export issues) and we can – in addition to providing the 2 days free management consultancy, connect SMEs to people who can provide specific practical answers to the concerns specific to their business, post or during the Brexit disentanglement process.
Any business feeling the pressure or simply not knowing where to start, could really help themselves by contacting the Enterprise M3 Growth Hub and requesting this free support today or at any time after March 29. Support is available at any point they need.
Melanie Redding is an Enterprise M3 Growth Hub Associate Growth Champion
