Mahout to feature at the International Enterprise Promotion Convention

Mahout™ is a simple but powerful online tool designed for SMEs to drive their performance to the next level and to measure their success. Managing Director Mark Fenwick will be speaking about helping SMEs to increase their value, through the virtual space, at the International Enterprise Promotion Convention in Yorkshire on Monday 16th of November at 9.30am, writes Adele Barlow.

Business comes in all shapes and sizes but we all need to know where we are and how we fit in the landscape. Diagnostic tools are plentiful but appear unsuitable for SMEs,  they are either driven by administrative needs of an Enterprise Agency adding no value, or they treat all businesses as the same providing inappropriate feedback.

Enter Mahout™ (www.mymahout.com), a hassle-free online service enabling SMEs to ask better questions, get better advice and make better decisions about their future direction. By taking users through a 12-step questionnaire, it gives SMEs information for their specific stage of growth, ambition and resources.

For SMEs, Mahout is a tool to understand market position and navigate progress, guiding strategic decisions and the implications of each crossroad. For enterprise agencies, Mahout helps to gather better market intelligence through the online space, as well as accurately assessing the impact of interventions. Mahout is working with organisations supporting and procuring public sector innovation (e.g. NESTA).

Now available online (with free access to the basic level service, thanks to NESTA), Mahout helps individual companies to:-

• Identify their relative market position;
• Select courses of action that will accelerate growth and development;
• Monitor their own progress and strategies over time;

The Conservative party Small Business Task Force has suggested that business support should be solely on line and centrally controlled.  Whilst our service is not aiming to replace the face-to-face time of professional business support intermediaries, it is a way to get significantly more value from the virtual world in the area of business support.

Mahout™ was set up by Pembridge Partners LLP with financial support from the One NorthEast Design and Creative Fund.