Our Expertise

Business Support

Improving business formation and growth rates is vital to the continued prosperity of the UK regions and nations.  In an environment of increasing global competition, it is more important than ever that we encourage businesses and improve their productivity, through innovation, upskilling their workforce and focusing more on high value-added products and services. Business support agencies at the local, regional and national levels have an important role to play in helping businesses to meet the challenges of today’s economy.

Step Ahead can help you to improve those support services by providing clear, robust research and consultancy that combines research with economic sense and an awareness of business support policy and programmes.

Our research has helped previous clients to: 

• identify the support needs of different types of businesses;
• understand the needs and concerns of emerging sectors;
• assess the levels of innovation in local businesses;
• identify and review the Continuing Professional Development needs of business owners and managers;
• measure business support customer satisfaction and introduce service improvement cycles;
• quantify the added value of support services;
• provide more effectively-targeted support to local businesses;
• develop new business support services.

Examples of our work include:

• designing a national customer satisfaction survey for Business Link to support comparative cross-region benchmarking and focused feedback for individual Business Link Providers. Around 30,000 – 40,000 interviews per annum are conducted with this survey.
  
  
• researching the main skills requirements of businesses in Slough through a questionnaire and interviews with businesses for the Learning and Skills Council.
  
  
• preparing an end-of-year performance management report, providing key performance statistics and value added analysis, for the Business Link network to submit to BERR.
  
  
• surveying 1,200 businesses for South East Business Links every quarter, alongside focus groups and interviews, to provide insight into a wide range of issues affecting businesses.
  
  
• evaluating business support networks in the South East to identify which should receive funding.

If you are interested in finding out more about our work in this area, please contact:

Jonathan Pratt: 01795 438875
jonathan.pratt@stepaheadresearch.co.uk

Nigel Tremlett: 01392 433381
nigel.tremlett@stepaheadresearch.co.uk