Bristol, England - Pembridge collaborated with Arts Matrix to deliver a workshop today aimed at helping small and medium-sized design consultancies acquire the skills, tools and knowledge to move from lifestyle business to growth business. Pembridge worked closely with Emma Collins, an independent consultant based in Bristol, in facilitating workshops on the process of business planning.
Funded by the South West Regional Development Agency (SWRDA) the workshop Design Your Future was developed to enable owners and managers of small and medium sized consultancies in and around Bristol to develop a business plan to facilitate further growth of their business. Concretely, the workshop focused on familiaising the participants with the process and aspects of business planning for design firms and on providing the key benchmarks and metrics in the design sector to measure their performance against.
The workshop took the form of a full-day, small-scale interactive session where the participants took the first steps to start their own business planning through small group work and blue sky thinking exercises. One of the key issues design SMEs face is a lack of confidence to think big and imaginatively in their own business plan, leading to a discrepancy between what owners want out of their business and what they are actually getting out of it. Owners are, generally, also unaware of the vital statistics of average design consultancies and their competition and thus find it difficult to benchmark their performance or fees.
The evaluation of the event was positive both from the participants and the facilitator's point of view, having reached both start-ups and established firms up to £1m turnover and 10 staff. Although each participant was facing his or her own challanges, the workshop succeeded in imparting the skills and the knowledge to start the business planning process. Emma Collins, who worked with Frank Krikhaar on this project, added: "Pembridge's expertise with business planning in design SMEs and their Vital Statistics business diagnostic scheme was invaluable in giving the participants the key drivers of value, indicators and confidence they needed to accurately plan and project their dreams on their business for the future".
The workshop, part of the wider Design Matters series, was organised in Bristol in July 2007 and a similar workshop is planned for October 2007 in Devon.
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