Add to that the fact that unemployment among those who have recently graduated from university is growing faster that general unemployment, then that may well have sealed it – why would you invest in something that is not going to get you a better return?

I have been giving a lot of thought to this recently as both a former graduate and someone who employs them. There has to be a way of harnessing what these young people can provide to businesses

I suppose the thing that stood out most was that on average, the public sector earns more than the private sector across every age bracket.

I would not have expected this to be the case – generally people assume that the private sector work longer hours but get paid more – clearly not the case. As more public sector employees join the private sector it would be interesting to look at this again next year…

The High Growth Foundation North West logo

Winning Pitch, along with its network of specialist advisers are launching the North West High Growth Foundation – a channeled source of advice and tailored business support for growth hungry companies. It will provide a forum for ambitious entrepreneurs and will be a valuable resource in gaining insights on how to build a successful business.

During the past two years, over 1,700 North West businesses have benefitted from coaching support delivered by Winning Pitch plc via The High Growth Programme, funded by the NWDA. The Programme has been widely recognised as having had a profound impact on the performance of growth hungry companies across the region, but is now nearing a successful completion. As a natural follow on from this support, Winning Pitch are launching The High Growth Foundation to enable companies to access further tailored support as they continue on their growth journey. The Foundation will offer a huge range of benefits, including workshops, specialist advice, access to the database of members and many ‘leading edge’ business tools and techniques. The High Growth Foundation is open to any company in the North West with a passion and commitment to sustainable growth.

If you would like to find out more there are full details on the website.

…and hairs a version of the vlog that didn’t go quite as smoothly

When we analysed the strategic growth plans of the businesses from the High Growth Programme the critical area businesses needed to address to ensure growth was sales planning and then sales implementation. This is probably not a major surprise but it focusses the mind in terms of supporting would-be high growth businesses to achieve their potential. Winning Pitch emerged from a sales coaching environment (hence the name) and we have strong opinions on the subject. Founder John Leach is a prolific writer on the subject and recently commented in his blog that great selling is about

- Finding problems and solving them
- Bringing added value that makes a difference
- Capturing the voice of the customer
- Living in the customer world
- Walking away if what you have does not align to the customer needs

The clear message is that businesses need a plan and they need a sales engine to implement it. How they get that in place is the challenge…we’ll be talking about this in more detail over the coming months…

The first dates for the 2011 Consultations “The Vital 6 – Why High Growth SMEs are the key to economic recovery” have been finalised for Derby, Cardiff and London with more to be released early in the new year. If you are an enterprise policy maker and want to attend you can find out more and register on our website

Very much looking forward to seeing you there!

Identifying large numbers of start-up businesses and business ideas that have high growth potential is a major issue for business support programmes. As the new government starts to investigate ways of supporting potential high growth businesses to stimulate private sector job creation, finding the right start-ups is crucial. Its hard to do however – many will work from home, many may still be in jobs and many will not yet be on companies house radar – so how can you target them if you can’t find them?

Working with i2m Software creators we have developed a tool for quickly attracting new start-ups and ideas online. We use it ourselves to signpost people to our programmes but we also repackage it for other support bodies (such as The University of Manchester Incubator Company, Oldham Council and Start-ups.co.uk). This helps them to attract new leads with very little opportunity cost, whilst adding immediate value to their client base. Anyway, watch the video to see how it works…

This is the presentation I gave at the recent Enterprise Promotion Conference in Harrogate.