MENTORING KEY TO BUSINESS SUCCESS IN BRITAIN| 19/7/2004

REPORT FROM INDEX OF BRITAIN'S MOST SUCCESSFUL INNER CITY BUSINESSES SHOWS BENEFITS OF ENTREPRENEURIAL MENTORING SHOULD BE EXPANDED

Mentoring carries extensive hard and soft benefits for small business in Britain and more should be done to encourage entrepreneurs both to take up mentoring services and become mentors themselves, says a new report from the Inner City 100, nef's definitive index of Britain's fast growth inner city businesses dubbed the "Enterprise Oscars" by Chancellor Gordon Brown. The report, "Entrepreneurial Mentoring: A Key to Business Success", 2004, shows how mentoring could be used to much greater advantage in Britain to improve business success and foster a more entrepreneurial culture.

Entrepreneurial mentoring can have strong positive benefits for business. Over a quarter of the Inner City 100 firms, Britain's fastest growing inner city businesses, are engaged in mentoring. Those firms have been established for, on average, 10 years with an average turnover of £5.1million, indicating that mentoring is not just useful to start ups but may help businesses at any stage of development.  An independent study of Northern Ireland's Bridge mentoring programme found a number of benefits for small and medium sized enterprises directly attributable to the scheme, including:

• Increased sales turnover of 3.3 per cent
  
• Increased after-tax profits of 17.9 per cent
  
• Increased employment of 6.1 per cent
  

The report shows that there are also a series of "soft" benefits such as increased confidence for entrepreneurs, better staff management and internal processes, and broader networking, which can improve business performance in the longer term.

Over 99 per cent of Britain's 3.8 million enterprises are small businesses employing 50 people or less. Encouraging wider provision and uptake of mentoring services would have financial benefits as well as furthering the governments' agenda of fostering a greater culture of entrepreneurship in Britain.

Most of the IC100 businesses engaged in mentoring either as a mentor or "mentee" have found the experience of very useful and beneficial, but the effectiveness of mentoring crucially depends on a good match of experience and business type. Many also thought mentoring services and networks

To capitalise on the advantages of mentoring in Britain, the report says government and the newly devolved business support services should:

• Establish a UK wide mentoring resource online, giving entrepreneurs information on where to mentoring schemes are in place
  
• Develop a lifelong mentoring approach, beginning with young budding entrepreneurs in schools
  
• Create a 'welcome pack' for newly registered businesses that includes details of mentoring schemes
  
• Offer a five year business health check, which would include encouraging entrepreneurs both to offer and take up mentoring services
  
• Establish a learning network between providers to enable the exchange of best practice

Nominations are open now until the end of July for inner city businesses to enter the 2004 Index, to be announced in November. Now in its fourth year and firmly established as a leading business research initiative, the Index will focus analysis over the next two years on the unique dynamic of inner city business and how it affects the UK's enterprise culture.

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	Publications Entrepreneurial Mentoring: A key to business success