The Spiral Profile

The Greenways Partnership

“Success is a journey, not a destination.”

Small Business Survey 2004

The Spiral Profile of the Suffolk small business community.

We introduced earlier the concept of the Spiral Profile. This can be used in one of two ways. First, it can be used as a tool to describe the characteristics of a given community. In this case, the tool is purely descriptive and is used to provide a profile of the community at one point in time. However, this approach can be quite limited. The usefulness of the tool is seen when it is used in the second way - as a comparative tool.

As part of the study, we looked to develop our analysis to include a comparator of some sorts. The Spiral Profile of the small business community could be measured against itself over time. This exercise would map the changes to the composition of the population over time, and would yield some interesting results about how the composition of the small business community varies over the course of the economic cycle. However, we did not have sufficient backward data to be able to undertake this analysis.

Another interesting exercise would be to compare the Spiral Profile of the Suffolk small business community with other small business communities, both within the UK and with a global context. This exercise would be useful in determining whether more dynamic and less dynamic small business communities have differing Spiral Profiles. From the policy perspective, this would be useful because, if there were a marked difference, then the life conditions associated with the more dynamic small business communities could provide a milestone for policy development. However, our limited resources precluded us from this exercise.

Finally, a Spiral Profile could be used to compare service delivery with service demand, both within the Private Sector and the Public Sector. If there was a significant mismatch between the Spiral Profile of service offerings and the Spiral Profile of the community to which the services were offered, then issues over the development of future services could be readily determined. In this case, the objective would be the congruence of the Spiral Profile of service offerings and the Spiral Profile of the community to which the services were offered. We felt that a review of the services offered to Suffolk small businesses in relation to the profile of the Suffolk small business community would suit our needs in terms of the resources available for this study.

Business Link Suffolk (BLS) is charged and funded by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTi), through the Small Business Service (SBS), to provide services to small business in Suffolk. As an objective, we decided to measure the Spiral Profile of this service offering with a view to examining whether or not it was congruent with the Spiral Profile of the Suffolk small business community.

This suited our needs very well, as the services offered by Business Link Suffolk are well advertised and described on their Web Site. In conducting the analysis, we secured details of 48 of the service offerings to small business from the BLS Web Site. We then reviewed the objectives of the service offering in relation to the Spiral Profile, categorised the service in terms of the Spiral, and collated the results. The resultant profile is as follows:

The comparison of the two profiles helps to explain a paradox in the Suffolk small business community. Surveys of those businesses that use the BLS services show a high level of satisfaction with the service that they have received, and that feel that the Business Link are doing a splendid job. However, surveys of a more general small business population show a high level of dissatisfaction with Business Link services. Our small business survey picked this view. In the words of one respondent (a Red business) “there is a lot of training for start-ups but not for existing businesses.”

This one statement really did hit the mark, and it is significant that it was made by a Red business. The Spiral Profile indicates the bulk of the BLS provision being offered to businesses at an early stage of the development process, whereas the profile of the population as a whole indicates that the bulk of small businesses are at later stages of development. This is easy to understand. If the business does not progress through the Beige and Purple life conditions fairly fast, they will be removed from the population by a combination of business failure and the lure of the security of employment.

It is at the Red stages of development that small business starts to have a choice in their progression. The survey indicates that many small businesses choose to remain small, that control of the business is a key motive for the business owner. This rather deflates the view that in every small business is a large business waiting to develop. It is true that some small businesses do go on to become larger companies - they progress through the stage of developing business processes (the Blue stage) to break into a larger scale of operations (the Orange stage). However, for a good majority of small businesses, the key objective is to tick over at a much smaller scale of operation.

Of course, it is also true to say that an even smaller number of small businesses seek to move beyond material achievement into the Green, Yellow and Turquoise stages of development. However, these small businesses are few and far between and tend to be the remarkable products of remarkable people.

From our analysis, we rather take the view that, in Suffolk, there are two areas of service provision that the Business Link might like to address. The first is the over-provision of services for small businesses at the most rudimentary stages of development. The second issue to address would be the relative under-provision of services for the more established small business who are at a later stage of development.

In particular, there seems to be something of a void for the Red business - the small business which is based around one or two owner/ managers who are completely happy in having control of their working lives and who do not wish to have too much responsibility for staff. The challenge for Business Link is to develop a service offering in this area. The invitation to other bodies is to fill this gap if the Business Link does not rise to meet the challenge.

Area of over provision.

Area of under provision.

For all enquiries, please contact us by E-mail at enquiries@greenways-partnership.com.

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