The Greenways Partnership

“Success is a journey, not a destination.”

Small Business Survey 2004

What hinders the Suffolk small business community?

The purpose of this question was to highlight those areas which the Suffolk small business community felt could be improved upon. Whilst not acting as a wish list (this was the role of Question 4), he emphasis for this question was to consider the past short-comings of the Suffolk small business community.

 

When we first posed the question, we expected the usual suspects to appear in the answers. In particular, we expected the three main hindrances to be a lack of broadband infrastructure, a poor transport network, and the ineffectual impact of a mediocre Public Sector. To a greater extent, our expectations were not disappointed.

 

The answers received fell into six categories, which can be tabulated as follows:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The surprise to us came in the form of the extent of the results that we achieved. It would seem that the people of Suffolk are as much of a hindrance to the Suffolk small business community as the three usual suspects put together.

 

We can draw some interesting conclusions by taking the results as they stand. It would appear that the much heralded Broadband deficiency is not as important to the small business community as it is held to be. This could be because those small businesses operating with out Broadband don’t know what they are missing, or it could mean that the business owners have simply found a way around the problem. This would lead us to question the emphasis placed on Broadband rollout by the public agencies, as it doesn’t appear to be that important to the small businesses themselves.

 

The perceived failure of the public sector was not entirely surprising. However, we did follow this up, as it would be instructive to see where the perceived failures lay. In follow up questioning, about three quarters of those who gave an answer in this area stated that the problem was with the pettiness, bureaucracy, and red tape associated with local councils. Ipswich Borough Council came in for particularly vehement criticism, and there seems to be a widely held view that Ipswich Council has adopted a stance that is hostile to the small business community. It is interesting to note that only two respondents cited a failure of the public sector at the national level as a hindrance to the Suffolk small business community.

 

The poorly developed traffic infrastructure concentrated mainly on the rail links to London and the A140 road between Suffolk and Norwich. Interestingly enough, we did not register any complaints about the A14 and the A12 roads. This is not to say that they were not significant, but, perhaps, it does mean that they were not uppermost in people’s minds at the point of survey.

 

The underdeveloped nature of the Suffolk economy was a surprising answer, and one that we looked at further. One respondent pointed out that no large companies have their HQs located in the county, which they felt rather restricted their opportunity to work locally. Another respondent felt that, because of the agricultural past, the business culture in Suffolk was unable to appreciate modern service businesses. Alternatively, other respondents pointed to the poverty of commercial premises in the county, whilst another group of respondents pointed to a lack of understanding of modern service based businesses by larger businesses, especially the banks. Some of these criticisms could be levied at a national level, and some of them are specific to Suffolk.

 

We found it interesting that one in five respondents could not think of anything that hiders small business in Suffolk. The follow up conversation did not reveal a great deal about this area. Most of those who responded in this way also took a positive view of the Suffolk small business community, which points to a certain degree of consistency in their position. However, our lack of success in this area would cause us to flag it as a possible area for follow up in a later survey.

 

The most widely held view - by over a third of the sample - that the people of Suffolk hinder the development of the small business community was something of a surprise to us. Early on, we wanted to find out what this means. In the supplementary conversations, the profile of the Suffolk people, built up from those who answered this question in this way, way of an insular community that is inward looking, resistant to change, unwilling to try anything new, that is unduly cautious, that is generally risk averse, and that will not spend anything that they do not have to. This profile resonated with us because it described, almost perfectly, those with a Country Dweller lifestyle. It made the result that more interesting. What the survey seemed to be saying is that the people of Suffolk are great as people to live with (see the previous question), but they are very difficult to do business with.

 

Perhaps this helps to explain why it is that so many businesses do business outside of Suffolk? Perhaps it helps to explain that a tenth of small businesses can find no positives to doing business in Suffolk? This is a theme that we looked to take up again in subsequent questions.

 

© The Greenways Partnership Limited 2004

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