Its difficult to believe, but its 13.5 years since Connect Yorkshire was launched at Magna Science Adventure Centre in Rotherham and started providing mentors to help Yorkshire companies grow and, until our Christmas party yesterday, we hadn’t been back since. But what a great place – and over 40 of our members including quite a few who came down from the Leeds group – enjoyed the “steel tour” including the big heat and a talk by Kevin a former steelworker at the mill.

John Silker, the CEO at Magna had generously agreed to allow us to visit Magna and have breakfast without charge. Thank you John. Unfortunately John had flu and was unable to join us but his place was taken by one of the guides Kevin who did a great job for us.

Free mentoring

So what’s happened since our launch? For starters I’m the only person who was at the launch and is still at Connect Yorkshire. For roughly the first 10 years we were supported by the public sector and by approx 40 private sector sponsors who gave us money and loads of free time providing mentoring. We won 3 contracts from Yorkshire Forward to run an Investment Readiness Programme and Investment Forums.

The main aspect of the contracts was to provide mentoring to help the companies raise funding. This free business mentoring was provided by our 40 plus sponsors who were drawn from most of the top professionals and entrepreneurs in Yorkshire. We helped Yorkshire companies raise over £45m over the 10 years and the mentoring was absolutely key to this.

Towards the end of the 10 years we won a big new 3 year contract at £1m pa to accelerate business growth of the applicants by supplying business mentors free of charge for 6-8 months. Despite repeated promises byYorkshire Forward and a very public launch by them of the new programme, that contract was never signed and instead, in the dying days of Yorkshire Forward, we received a contract for 1 year at £500k which we duly delivered.

Using the money we had saved over the 10 years and wanting to continue to help Yorkshire companies grow we launched the Connect Gazelles in November 2011.

What have we learnt in those 10 years

• Public money can stop, and usually does, however good a job you’ve done. And whatever Governments promise awarding contracts to big companies is easier for them than many contracts to SMEs so that’s what they do.
• Consultants and coaches are after fees and have rarely been there and done it.
• When you change the model, or start a new division in your business, you generally need to change the staff – “we’ve always done it this way” is absolutely banned at Connect Yorkshire.
• Providing good service to your customers is the only way to build a sustainable business.

Do you agree that when you change the business model, you need to change the staff?