 The First Item on the Agenda is Item 1, which is a decision by the committee to take items 4 and 5 in private. Are we agreed? Yes. Thank you. We now continue with our business support inquiry and I welcome today our three witnesses. First of all, Rachel Brown, who is the Chief Executive Officer at the Cultural Enterprise Office. Douglas Westwater, Executive Director, Community Enterprise and Fiona Godzman, Chief Executive of the Scottish Institute for Enterprise. Welcome to all three of this morning and thank you for coming in. If I might start with a question, a fairly general question, but about the provision of business support in Scotland for small to medium-sized enterprises at local level. How would each of you describe this and what are the strengths and weaknesses of support for SMEs in Scotland at local level and what can be done to improve that? I should say that there's no need to press any buttons. The sound desk will operate these for you, so if you just indicate by raising your hand if you want to come in or just join the discussion as appropriate. So who would like to start on that question? Well, it smiles all round, but no takers. I'll go, because I'm always willing to fill a vacuum. I think that one of the challenges, one of the reasons that we all delayed responding, is that we all work with very specialist groups of people. It's quite hard for us to speak in a kind of generic basis about the needs. My organisation, we work with students and recent graduates and we specifically work with students who are very innovative ideas, so they don't really fall into it. It's not easy for them just to slot into more generic business advice, so that's the first thing from that perspective. So when we do use things like business gateway, it is actually when we've got them to a stage, we've quite often been working with them for quite some time on their business idea and their business model before they're even ready to step in and take some of the more generic, here's how you start the business, here's how you set up your accounts and all that sort of thing. So once they're at that stage, once we've got ready and they're at that stage, it's actually fairly straightforward because we've already primed them and we're getting them to go in and ask for the advice that we know that will be easily accessible for them at that stage. I'm not sure if that's much help for you. Well, it is helpful to hear, obviously, from your point of view, the type of individuals you're helping and looking to help. When you do come to business gateway at that stage, once you get to that stage with these individuals, how do you find the system works then? It depends on the individual that they end up speaking to. I think that's the message that comes across loud and clear. Sometimes you get somebody who's absolutely great, but you don't always. As I say, we've got very specialist business advisors who are used to working with innovative young people who've got no experience of business because they are still at university or college or they're just recently graduated, so they don't have experience of setting up business and they don't have the business language. So, if they get somebody that gets them, that's great, but if you get somebody that actually isn't used to dealing with people like that, then that's quite challenging because actually you are very, very smart people, but they'll lack confidence when it comes to the business side and business language. So, you know, if they get somebody who just basically has a tick box exercise then they really struggle. They need somebody that can actually coach them through things. Otherwise, you know, they might as well just send them to a website and actually that doesn't work because the personal support, the personal engagement and actually somebody saying, well, you know, the personal shopper, if you like, that's really what they need. Rachel Brown. I would agree with everything that Fiona said. I think one of the interesting comments that we always get when clients come and speak to us either before going to business gateway or after going to business gateway is the lack of understanding of the entrepreneurial activity that they want to develop. So, it's not necessarily that people want to start with a business idea and take it through a general process. It's the fact that they want to do something entrepreneurial or something interesting and especially within the creative industries, that becomes a very specialist and niche place to develop an idea quite quickly. So, the generic support around business support is really very good and actually business gate, we do a lot of creative industry meetings and engagements and the website information is really pretty thorough. Where it falls down is that person-to-person contact that is the specialist that has perhaps been involved in that situation before or knows the choices to make between an entrepreneurial activity and a straight business start-up. We specialise in the SME space within the creative sector and I often describe it as the canary in the coal mine around portfolio working. So, generally speaking, a lot of the creatives that we work with might do several different things and this type of business activity is one thing and it's rarely linear. So, when they go to business gateway with an idea around setting up the business, it may come across as a lifestyle choice rather than an employment opportunity and that can get lost in translation often. I have to say though that we see an equal amount of people go to business gateway with a really positive experience and come to us when they're ready for specialist support and we also see a lot of people that are referred straight to business gateway to us who require specialist support straight away. We've got an even experience in so far as the numbers that people are looking here. We've had around about 113 people referred to us from business gateway this financial year and we've referred 75 to business gateway. So, it's a recognition that there's a niche somewhere and that they're playing their role and we're playing our role. In terms of verse, we're pauling at the beginning and getting us to shop isn't there going to be the problem. I suppose our niche in terms of community enterprises is social enterprises, so that's our role supporting social businesses. From the very tiny little community groups up to multimillion pounds businesses but they're coming from different perspectives. I think our experience of business gateway is very much what Fiona and Rachel said. It can be very, very good and it can be very, very not good and it's quite a bit of a postcode lottery and I'm certainly not going to name and shame but some areas will simply get a referral from us what they view as a social enterprise. I think that you're not one of us so you're actually something else and that's where that referral comes to us. The business gateway simply lifts the phone and says, well, these guys are actually social enterprise, that's a new world and they come across to us and they don't really engage with them. I will maybe name and praise, but where we're based in one of our offices in West Lothian, the business gateway there, there we have almost an informal tripartite arrangement with ourself's social enterprise network and the business gateway adviser and it's excellent. It's just very, very good and it gives three different perspectives so we have one project and a bit of difficulty and some people were trying to say, well, you need a wee bit of cash, you can go for rewards for all, get a grant sort yourself out and as soon as she went with us and met with business gateway, the adviser said, yeah, you have a cash flow difficulty, you need to liquidate some of your assets and she needed to hear that commercial language and that worked very well. I think that partnership approach that we have in that and other areas works very well so when it's just, when the referral that Ray is talking about is simply a lift in the phone, can you help these guys? It's not quite so good. No, Jackie Baillie. I want to develop that theme of partnership working because obviously you are individually quite specialist organisations and I'm keen to know the extent of the collaboration engagement partnership working that does go on because, as Douglas described, I think that's a model that works, but did it arise informally? Are there formal partnerships? Is the kind of beneficial place to be beyond referral and much deeper working so I'd be interested in your views? Yes, in theory, we have a formal relationship with business gateway as in we are the creative partner but as my colleagues have described on the ground that's ad hoc. We don't have any formal partnerships although we are developing one with Glasgow City Council in the recognition that specialist support is required. We do tend to get referrals just as Douglas described in an ad hoc. They don't fit our system, they must fit yours way. The challenge that we've got is that we are in comparison, we are tiny and we can never meet the amount of inquiries that we get so having a much more collaborative approach where there's a deeper understanding of who we actually deal with and the needs and wants of that sector would be really helpful. We deal with business model of choice, we deal with social enterprise, we deal with commercial, we deal with high growth, we also deal with any subset of the creative industries of which there are 16. That can often be quite confusing for people because they go, well, are we a dancer? Is it an artist? Is it digital? Is it tech? It's all of those things but the key point that sometimes gets missed within business gateway is that we deal with people at transition points of their business journey. If they're having leadership challenges or financial challenges or they've got an idea that didn't work and they want to try a new idea, which is very common in our sector, that gets lost. Having a deeper collaboration where people could really understand the needs and wants of the sector would be hugely helpful and quite world-leading. Our dedicated office is the only office of its kind in Europe that is similar with my colleagues here. Scotland has a really rich landscape that we're not threading together as well as we could be. I think that it's a fundamental question and it works best when people collaborate. The biggest problems that we have internally are partnership and collaboration when people let us down or we let them down. It's difficult, it's challenging, it's not perfect but I think that we get better results when people work well. We certainly find, particularly, but not just the business support, we all certainly find with an entrepreneur or an entrepreneurial idea, which, as we were discussing before, can be a group of people. It's not always just the archetypal entrepreneur, it can be a bunch of people with an idea to develop. When we look back and see how things have worked really effectively, it's when you've got a group of people who have a fabulous idea, well, I don't have a lot of ideas, but I can help people to get where they want to go, but they can't, maybe, sometimes, so they get stuck. We find people with hugely brilliant ideas, but if we get the right business support in beside them and the right funding and investment, those kind of three things, and maybe four things, maybe networking, so they're talking to other like-minded people, that's where we think see sustainability and success. Often, there can be just business support or just funding, or they're just a member of a network. If we can ring not only just partnership and business support but partnership with networking funding and those other bits, that networking beyond just business support I think is really effective, but very briefly, it's ad hoc, it's not formalised, and it's based on who I happened to know over the last few years, if I haven't worked as Fiona and Rachel. You build your own networks as business gateways do, so it can be quite ad hoc. We don't have any formal relationship with business gateways, we don't get referrals from them. We will see, we're normally working at quite a small scale as well, because we're very specialist, we're looking for the innovative student ideas, but we'll see 300 students, new students every year, we're working with a cohort of 100 who have definite intent or definitely developing businesses, and of those we'll probably refer them all at some point to business gateway for the access to market reports or access to the kind of workshops etc that they'll do. We don't get referrals back from business gateway, and they probably don't actually know that we exist, because I'm sure some students will probably go to business gateway first, because they'll have heard of it, without coming to us or without going to their own university or college enterprise. We don't see them coming back to us at all. Our biggest challenge, we've only got three business advisors because we're quite small, so although we're working with every university and college, and really any innovative student, the ones that you hear about nowadays, really bright smart ones have come through us, but there's only three of our business advisors, and there's a lot of different business gateway offices, so we don't have that strong personal relationship. We used to have, with Scottish Enterprise actually, we used to have with the kind of entrepreneurial team at Scottish Enterprise, and we used to refer the high growth potential students straight there, and we had one key contact at Scottish Enterprise who would then signpost the students to the relevant people, but since the system has changed and you get the high growth support from business gateway, we've lost that single point of contact for us as an organisation, and I think that that might well be beneficial to have somebody within the business gateway network that could actually be the point of contact for specialist organisations such as ourselves to make sure that we've got that good strong relationship going so that we can refer people to the right people in business gateway. Do you network with others? Are there people in the private sector who would ordinarily come in and maybe do this kind of thing? Absolutely, I mean I think that's one of the key, we all know each other, you know, we all, the Scotland Can Do Forum for instance, which is massive now, we tend to all know each other, we know where to signpost people out, certainly we refer people to Rachel's organisation, we refer them to the innovation centres, we refer them to special, we're our own network, private contacts, to get that right early stage advice, that's the networking part which is absolutely vital, and we've got very, very strong and diverse networks to refer people to, yeah. Okay, interesting thank you, convener. Angela Constance. Thank you, convener, and good morning to the panel. I'm sorry to mention the B word, that's Brexit, but I wondered if the impact of Brexit will necessitate the need for different support for SMEs, social enterprises, start-ups, and if so, you know why and who should provide and how. And I suppose more specifically, given that ERDF and European structural funds have made a huge contribution to business support services, I wondered whether you had any views on sustainability as we move forward. Yeah, so we're seeing some, we're seeing two very interesting things with the Brexit conversation, one positive, one negative. To start with the negative, from the get go, our clients are global, if you're involved in music it doesn't matter if you live in Greenock or you live in Cathness, you can sell your product globally, and that's a challenge. It's a challenge because we know that festivals are not able to book people fast enough now, there's been a halt on people's ability to trade their IP across Europe in particular. The rest of the world has always been slightly problematic, especially the US when it comes to music, but it's almost stunted activity if people are not able to get to the book festival they're supposed to get to or the music festival they're supposed to get to sell their trade. A lot of the clients we work with, they might be a musician, but they might make more money on songwriting or their IP exchange, so there's a missed opportunity and a misunderstanding of what's really needed. In terms of business support for that, we've done a lot of helping people through crisis. Costs have gone up 20 per cent in some key areas. How do people manage that when it was unexpected? That's been really quite challenging and it's been really quite challenging because we've lost people to other cities in the UK because there's maybe more robust support, Bristol being one of them, Cardiff being another, Manchester being another. Inevitably, over all, 40 per cent of the creative industry sit within London, but actually we see Scotland and in particular Glasgow as a bit of a global gateway, so you can get a little bit obsessed with London. It's the smaller cities that are the challenge. In terms of business support, it becomes more about life support as well as the business aspect of it. That's where the positive message comes through from Brexit. We are seeing a lot of what we've been calling creative returners back to Scotland to lots of people that want to come home and people that want to recognise that they want to have their creative career from Scotland. We've got the right ecosystem to make that happen, but we don't have the joined up approach yet. People are coming who may have had a career in London for 20 years. I've chosen to come back to Glasgow and Dundee in particular. We're seeing a lot of traffic, but how do we hook them in to largely an industry that is built on individuals? People are paying 40 per cent tax, they are having a portfolio career, but there's not an easy route in because it's considered linear. We were talking about this earlier on that everybody that we work with comes in and out of the system at key points. It's not a linear journey, so some people may have what would be a good year and then maybe a bad year. In the creative industries, that's par for the course and it's very difficult for people to find the right type of support from that point of view and from an ERDF point of view. We've never received any European money. We are largely funded as a project because of a specialist organisation, so it hasn't had an effect on us, but it has had an effect on where we can send people to, and there are definitely gaps. Okay, thank you for that, Douglas. I suppose I'll answer it from a slightly different perspective, maybe. We were discussing this internally at our strategy, and we have 20 staff from different perspectives who do various marketing and market research and community development, all sorts to nurture business from quite an early stage and develop social enterprises from there, and they tap into lots of support. The common theme that I have been having in the last few months, maybe a year, partly to do with Brexit but not solely, is that there is a reduction in funding and support, the levels of support. If that's coming in, I looked at that question and thought, well, honestly, I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. I don't know, but we are certainly seeing the volume of business support available reducing people having less time but demand going up, because people are being asked to be more entrepreneurial and develop businesses and those people are quite new to it and therefore need support, so demand's going up and the supply's going down, but I think, and to chant a lot of people who provide some support of different kinds are saying, well, we don't have enough and we don't have enough, we don't have enough resources, and there can be a wee bit of a poverty mentality, and actually there are other ways to do things, so there was quite a traditional route years ago, people come with an idea and they get lots of support and a business plan and financial planning and a marketing strategy and funding and investment, and actually now we're seeing that doesn't exist now, so we need to find new ways of doing things, and again, if you'll forgive me using an example, we're trying to build a business support infrastructure around 10 organisations in the borders, and it's a struggle, it's quite light in terms of what's available, and actually what we did is we thought, well, there's four organisations doing something similar, probably five or six years down the line, and we spent £700 taking those people to visit those other folk for a day, and it was transformational, and they're now implementing new business practices simply through seeing like-minded people who have done that, so I think that almost circumvented quite a lot of business support that would have been put in from scratch, just simply talking to similar people, and that was just one example where I think we can be smarter at providing business support in different ways to deal with what is essentially cuts, but rather than moaning about the cuts, it's just finding a cleverer way to do things. Okay, thank you, Ms Gordon. Yeah, haha. This could be very interesting. As I see, we work with students in recent graduates, and I would say that, I don't have the statistics, but I would say that well over 50% of the students and young graduates that we're working with who have got innovative high-growth potential businesses are actually not from Scotland, not even from the UK. Mostly Europe, sometimes beyond Europe as well. At the moment, they're still here. We, they are always incredibly positive about the support that they get in Scotland. They find Scotland a very, very good place to do business. Now, these are students who are not native to Scotland but who have studied here, who are the brightest individuals, the people that you really, really want to be here, and they really want to be here too. I don't know what's going to happen with Brexit because if we don't have these people coming here, we're not going to see the same level of graduate start-up in Scotland because we're not seeing these individuals. An example, we have a very successful young company called MindMate who were started by two German students and I think the third one was from Mexico who have had hundreds of thousands of pounds of investment have done extremely well. They started off in Scotland, they've got support from several different organisations ourselves, Scottish Edge, Converge yourselves, great bunch of people. They had the opportunity to be in an incubator in Berlin, they chose to stay in Scotland, they went to tech stars in New York which they found an amazing experience, they came back to Scotland. We offer a lot to these individuals but at the moment, as I say, they're coming here and they're still studying here but I don't know what will happen in the future if we don't have these people coming. They have an effect that is probably quite difficult to measure. I do think that it's not that international students are better than Scottish students, I think it's the ones who choose to study abroad are probably more entrepreneurial, more innovative, more open to new ideas because they're travelling to study so we are capturing the best of the best really but the knock-on effect is when you're networking and when you're bringing the Scottish students together with these people that confidence really rubs off and so you get the homegrown talent actually really benefiting, it's the effective competition I guess as well that actually it raises the level at which everybody plays by having these really bright, smart people here. So what will happen after Brexit to people like that? I really don't know but they'll have other choices and they won't come to Scotland will they? Thank you very much for those fulsome answers. Moving on to my next question which is a changing subject, I would be interested in the panel's views on how our approach to embedding equalities in business support, how that could be more mainstreamed, how that could be improved and you know how does the business support landscape reach under represented groups, whether that's women, whether that's the black and minority ethnic community, people with disability or indeed folk who live in more disadvantaged areas and I'm going to start with Douglas Westwater because I know you have some experience in this area. Well speaking as a white middle-class male without a disability. I'm glad you've changed your privilege. Yeah I think that the equalities thing is incredibly interesting, I think we were very briefly talking to this earlier on, I think where we find equalities coming through in issues is where businesses are developed not starting from a business idea but starting from the social need and actually the business, the entrepreneurialism comes later, the business comes later. If I can give you one example which I think was very interesting literally just happened a few days ago, I was doing some training with a funder, a grant funder who gives grants to women and girls suffering from domestic violence so these are entirely grant funded organisations and I was asked to go in and speak around sustainability because the funders thinking well when this fund finishes these groups are where are they going you know three years down the line. A lot of the groups were kind of struggling to think of ideas, how do you commercialise a women's refuge it's quite difficult but one woman kind of said, she's simply going to say well I'm not, I don't know this, I don't know whether this will work but actually we have a lot of women who we support who have a very challenging backgrounds and domestic violence in very difficult situations we take them out give them some support help them to get into supported accommodation and generally they're on their own not always sometimes with their children and they're protected and so on and she said of course the big problem is as they move into a tenancy they'll inevitably need a cooker plumbed in or a set of shelves put up or a plumber because they've got a blocked drain or something and she said 99.9 times out of 100 that tradesman is going to be a tradesman it's going to be a male and that's a real issue because people are frightened and they're there so she said I just suddenly thought well maybe um maybe we need to train up some women to be plumbers and electricians and and she said I've thought about that idea simply to address the issue around fear but she suddenly thought well maybe that could be commercialised and we talked in that mean everybody got excited and we've suddenly we've got a national women's led trades person project but that example is very common whether it's disability or drugs or environment or whatever it might be people come addressing a need and you're a third of the way into the idea before you suddenly think oh my word this needs sustained and the business comes out at that point rather than you know they don't come to business gate we are just enterprise or or these business right at the beginning saying I've got a business I want to run a need a business plan it's based on need and addressing the need and then oh goodness we need to sustain it and that's the point where it can become a business so the impact of that on the type of support that needs to be available and provided is what then well I think the type of support needs to be incredibly sensitive and that's that is I mean a lot of the social enterprise support we do which is why we are great advocates of working very very closely with business gateway but having just enterprise and others a specialist business support because there is a social impact and there's the business impact and they often compete and they often so if we are working with for example these simple simple things like a homelessness organisation who many of you may know doon would work in creating would work wood items and on one hand they can say well you can create this build build me a thousand planters totally solves their financial big margins the business will fly but these younger people with mental health issues and drug addiction need to find something very creative and they work for months on a high bespoke beautiful cabinet and they sell it for a thousand pounds and so the social impact is very very high the financial margins are very low so that constant discussion between the financial imperative and the sustainability of the business and the social impact is constantly there and often a business advisor will say to them that's a stupid decision build your planters and often somebody with too much of a social impact will say those folk in business they you know it actually is all about the if then if you need both and they're constantly crashing against each other okay thank you miss godsman yeah um so we work with probably quite a privileged group of people because we are working with people in generally in full-time education in most of the more universities but i think in terms of the specialist support i think um one of the things and i speak to someone who's involved in one of the colleges as well so i think um i think a lot of it is to do with building confidence in people and giving them a belief in themselves right at the get go so way before they even think that they might have a business idea and i think for that that's where you need the specialist social enterprises and the specialist projects that are targeted at particular demographics um so you think of organisations for instance like radiant and brighter who work with you you're aware of um an awful lot of what they're doing is building confidence building a community people walk into a room where they're comfortable where they know people um and from that and that encouragement that's how you start to build up you know that the ideas people that might actually have ideas ultimately become business but they still need that level of handholding and they need that confidence boost before they'll walk through the doors of business gateway so i think there's an awful lot around specialist projects that are targeted at specific demographics and i think again with the island cloud college they've got projects where they're involved with students who've who've uh of young people refugee community and young people refugee community and actually building their confidence and their abilities and really you know you work with groups of people like that without focusing on actually you have a business opportunity or you could be an entrepreneur you could start a business there's an awful lot of groundwork that needs to be done before that and i think that has to be done by specialist agencies and generally probably social enterprises are probably the best at doing that but having the links then between these social enterprises and the business gateway support is probably the key thing that these relationships and partnerships with the organizations is important for these organizations it's probably the key thing okay thank you miss brown so the majority of people we work with are freelance portfolio self-employed creatives so there's a real interesting challenge there with generic support because how do we ensure fair work and when you when there isn't an employer there's a customer and sometimes our experience has been that the customer is king in terms of general support so the advice that's been given to the the freelancer or the individual is always being focused on you've got to do what your customer asks or do what your customer asks we've done a lot of work on and we support fair work so how do you encourage people to negotiate the correct contract how do you encourage people to have the right type of approach and be valued and viewed especially just as an example a specialist project we are doing is engaging with creatives who have long-term health conditions and how can we support them to continue to work as creatives given the fact that our industry is 24 seven and you can be trading in in America and not leave your bedroom if you don't want to how do we make sure that's a positive experience and that's sort of that as my colleagues have described that very nurturing enabling environment changes slightly the the type of business support that you give and the way that you give that business support because it's on the needs of that particular customer so we we deliver business support at seven o'clock at night at 10 o'clock on a Sunday morning if that's appropriate and relevant there's nothing nine to five about our service because it has to be reactionary to our clients we do see the majority of creative entrepreneurs coming through that want to make a successful business are 45 plus at the moment and we're seeing a large increase in female founders and we're seeing a large increase in the bme community coming forward and i think it's about building other organisations of built confidence to then pass on to us but we have been the specialist not the generalist okay thank you thank you andy whiteman thanks convener and thanks to all for coming this morning the government's quite focused now on the the new strategic board that come out of the enterprise and skills review which is designed to bring coherence to to high in Scottish Enterprise Scottish Funding Council etc how much contact have you had with the national organizations responsible for business support and to what extent do you think the relationship between business gateway and some of these national agencies is working well i suppose we if i fell briefly start i suppose it is has been very different personally i have no idea how that's going to go but we we will certainly more than welcome that kind of decision that's a strategic decision just absolute grassroots experience we're not talking strategically particularly but we work across scotland we do a lot of work in highlands and islands and have done and across the central belt in cities and towns working with high has been just different you immediately have contact with local development officer because of that mix of community and enterprise you just immediately have a routine and we have relationships with Highlands and Islands Enterprise easily and strongly and work very jointly work with them our relationship with Scottish Enterprise has been honestly pretty nil it's been very very difficult to get in there's one person who's excellent but one person in the whole organization responsible for social enterprise and she's great but it's quite hard to get a routine it is absolutely changing i've seen a real difference in the last six months or a year and a more openness transparency it's been great but that's been a real difference so trying to take some of the learning from high and and using that i think will be very very valuable and i hope that the south of scotland organization when it appears has that joint community and enterprising approach because that's i think where sustainability works well so i'm certainly seeing a positive change but getting into the specialist support of scotland enterprise for social enterprises has been very challenging and we've had a few examples where they've gone and gave business gateway have said well we're your gateway in and we'll try and get you into the high tech support for example exporting that kind of thing and there has been a real barrier of actually getting that support with scotland enterprise even when you're going through business gateway yes why is that i'm not sure really to be honest i think it's partly perception i think there's a perception a lot of the people we are coming to them with aren't proper businesses not commercial enough the language isn't right um yeah i'm not honestly not quite sure but we've tried to get some support there and it's been difficult okay yeah i mean we we at one stage we had some funding directly from scotland enterprise and as a result we had a key contact at scotland enterprise and things worked extremely well that person was the the basically our route into a huge amount of support in scotland enterprise and that person fully understood the types of people that we were putting forward for them and directed them to the right level of support i think one of the challenges that we've now faced is that we're working with people who have absolutely without a doubt high growth potential but that hasn't been proven because they're still at very early stage they need access to the specialist support they'll hugely benefit from interventions from the right people but they don't necessarily tick the right boxes at that stage so it can be very challenging to go through business gateway into the business gateway high growth team and actually say look this person really we know we've been working with them this person needs that specialist support and needs it now you know you can't wait until they've actually ticked a box achieved a certain milestone because actually if you're working with very innovative organisations as we are innovative ideas with patents it's actually a long journey before they actually are starting to maybe tick the financial thresholds because actually there's there's still you know you're talking about people that are getting investment but are not actually making any money yet and how do you get the right sort of support from them the other challenge that we have our funding comes from the scotty funding council there's still a lot there's still a big silo mentality between the different organisations and we quite often hear about projects that have been started where we actually are very well qualified to either advise or actually deliver on some of the work but it's actually been given to somebody else who needs to start from the bottom where we could actually either work with them and start from a higher level or actually we could hit the ground running because we've got that expertise but people in the funding council or Scottish Enterprise or whatever actually don't know of our existence because we're you know we work with a particular department and the other department who doesn't know what we're doing and that is a challenge that we see again and again and again and it finds very very frustrating and does that have a direct effect on some of the people you're working with or are you just saying that the effectiveness of the national agencies is not as good as it could be because no no no it does have a direct effect on the people that we're working with because if we can't get them the timely advice that they need that has a real knock-on effect I mean you could stop somebody when you're working with some we're working with really bright young people if they keep hitting their head against and they don't have the money you know they're recent graduates they're used to surviving on a shoestring they don't have a big you know they don't have a mortgage you don't have family support I mean one or two of them might but most of them don't so it's not that they're kind of looking for large sums of money they actually they need the money they need the advice to get to the next next stage of their business and if they don't get that they may well be offered a graduate job somewhere and go and do that and you lose that potential so it has a real knock-on effect and it's simply because you can't get access quickly enough to the support you need it's you know okay you're in the system and somebody will get back to you but two or three months later it's actually no good because actually by then they'll have to maybe they'reverted to plan B and plan B could take them outside of Scotland can I just very briefly if you don't mind just very very briefly I think something just maybe comes I was thinking when you asked your question about I think the perspective can be quite different so Scottish Enterprise and business support often business support is about the perspective we're coming from growth so you will give you support to help you to grow to grow by x hundred thousand a year x hundred staff we want you to franchise we want you to become bigger and there's a big issue with that in our sector some people want to grow and we would welcome that I'm certainly not anti growth by any stretch of the imagination but a lot of our enterprises are very happy to be who they are so they might come and say we want to develop a shop locally and want to do some innovative stuff around e-commerce but we want to be in that village in Fife we're not interested in having 10 shops or 20 shops or 100 staff or so growth is a real issue a lot of our clients are running very effective sometimes high turnover businesses but growth the growth for what you know the last well why so growth is an issue that commitment to growth that Scottish Enterprise comes from that perspective and all of our clients don't not all of them but certainly a lot of them a lot of the clients that we deal with are trend setters so they're bringing the pre idea so sky scanner would be a good example of people that were working within the culture enterprise office for two years before those ideas were developed so it's very difficult for us to bring that to the table with Scottish Enterprise because the growth that a lot of the creatives that we work with might not be seen for two or three years time but actually the level of expertise they need is actually at a different level it's not that we're starting from a baseline and we work our way up in terms of advice and support it's that actually there's something really interesting bubbling here how do we get the right the right type of investment around them the right type of support and mentoring around them so when they're ready to grow it can explode it's very difficult for us I think in the creative sector not to be treated as a lifestyle business most people understand digital if I went to with a digital high growth project no matter what it did we would probably get some level of investment and support because people can understand now the mechanisms of the impact that can have what we always try and say and it's I think my colleagues have said the same thing is that what would it look like if we had 100 businesses or 500 businesses or 1000 businesses all turning over half a million quid in our local areas all turning over a million pounds in our areas looking at fair work policies looking at how we can distribute a pipeline looking at how we can have a social impact a creative impact and an economic impact and we're talking about growing a sector rather than growing individual businesses that seems to be for us certainly in the specialist space where all the trends and the supports and where other cities are doing well Bristol are doing that brilliantly and Cardiff are starting to recognise that hub approach and doing that brilliantly so it's about the wider inclusive growth piece rather than the linear growth and we work similarly colleagues we work great with highlands and islands we we've started a really productive relationship with the south but it's people's perception of what growth and scale is in the middle that's holding that most of our businesses don't take a linear approach to growth it can be almost boom and bust but that's quite healthy and then it can have an impact on other communities in other areas and I feel that that gets missed just to I think that probably the point I was trying to make as well about getting access to that specialist support is actually we're working with individuals that actually probably need to leap frog a few stages and and that's where it gets really difficult because we know these people with huge potential and if you make them jump through and go from one level in incremental steps actually they're ready to leap from boom to boom you know we're a young guy um snap 40 who uh medical student at Dundee and um you know within a year he'd got significant investment in his company and you know the speed at which he developed was phenomenal um and and you need to be able to support that as well as the ones that that are slow and steady um and maybe take a little longer to get there but actually the outliers the ones that you go from here to here fast sometimes you just don't get the right sort of support at the right time for them okay thank you very much and Colin Beattie thank you very much um clearly given the diverse organisations that are involved here they're it's very important that everybody's heading generally in the same direction and I wonder to what extent our local support services including business gateway aligned with existing policy and how do we ensure that appropriate cross policy connections are made so I think that's quite difficult to answer from from the from a perspective so as a specialist organisation we think we're fully aligned with um the direction of travel from the Scottish Government point of view we see how we see very much the impact on our on our um customers around inclusive growth innovation especially those are the two areas that keep coming up and we see where we're perfectly aligned them and all of the organisations that we see and the individuals we see are quite ambitious in their own space it's difficult where that breaks down into local level because there's some time our competing priorities especially we're based we're head office in Glasgow um often the local geography can play a big part in that so they might want to see more businesses housed in a particular geography of the city or um within a particular locale around an office block that needs to be filled and there's a kind of pressure around the local impact there and business gateway confirm who they are they I know sorry I was being polite um the so with business gateway in our local area in Glasgow there is a there is often a push to fill particular building um often a push to develop a particular set of resources that the city needs the organisations or the clients that we work with might have bigger ambitions than that is that push from the council um I would expect it's probably a mixture of things yes probably a push from the council it definitely can be a push from peers as well um and it can be a push from different sectors so if you're working with social enterprise for example or if you're working um sometimes within further and higher education you wouldn't want to lose students from a particular area so we have that definite challenge with Glasgow University at the moment where we're keeping everybody together in Glasgow University rather than letting the students be a bit more ambitious and going off and doing other things I think there is a real need to understand the mark the pace of the market at the same time as the pace of the support and the pace of what people want to achieve in a particular locale so if the pace of the market dictates that somebody wants to go from zero to hero in 18 months they should be allowed to do that they shouldn't have to go through the steps of let's be based in this geography for a little while let's move through the sector development programme let's be part of this academic group they should be able to to do that and I would experience certainly with the creative industries is there's not that freedom at a local level it's still very much gate kept as you go through and sometimes the ambitious ambition of the clients that we work with is not fully recognised because it's not fully understood. Anyone else got a comment on that? Well I suppose it doesn't affect us too much except that we do find that sometimes you know that there are certain business incubators and accelerator programmes where the students are being really quite actively pushed into going into this accelerator which is really not right for them and which you know it's hard to resist because it limits the amount of support that they're going to get so you know there's an opportunity that there may be elements of what that incubator or that elevator programme is offering that would be of benefit but actually to say no you need to go into this you need to be based here if you want to access all of this that that can be a real challenge to kind of squeeze people into these places where they really don't don't need to to be. These are local pressures which are interesting to hear about. It's not government policy obviously, it's very much at a local level. I was concerned when you mentioned about silos between different organisations. How do you align policy when you're working with silos? If I knew the answer to that I think you probably just answered it. Yeah it's really difficult it's often people from the outside that actually make the connections. I think in some ways if you don't mind. I was thinking about some of this when you said that to you. I mean people, well we're all people, people sectors and industries come from different perspectives and I think we're certainly seeing a move. I suppose we sit somewhere in the middle in terms of social enterprise and community business. We absolutely came across it last week see people fit on whatever side their community development side who will quote the community engagement strategy and they have a policy framework that they work in and the very extreme end of that will say business is bad, the profit motive is bad, we're here to help people that's ridiculous, we don't want to be businesses that's kind of over there and over this side you've kind of got a policy framework around sustainable economic growth and profit and growth and numbers of staff and economic development and reducing unemployment figures those sorts of things and the profit motive becomes really important and I suppose we're where we sit somewhere in the middle and we're certainly seeing that bigger picture beginning to bring those things together because of reality the community development guys have to become more business like they have to be trading they have to be sustaining what they do at a local level and starting to buy into the 10 year social enterprise strategy and community empowerment asset transfer land reform those kind of things and take those opportunities and move towards that kind of businessy bit and the guys at this end are beginning to say well actually we need to have fair business practices we need to reinvest in our community because otherwise people won't buy our stuff so we have to be nicer we have to have social enterprise supply chains environmental policies and so on and so we're going to see good businesses using that coming towards the nicer policy framework but communities moving towards the more commercial policy framework and so those that national policy around broadly sustainable economic growth we're certainly seeing that movement slowly towards the middle and the tanker beginning to point in the direction of basically everybody working towards some level of sustainability how do you view the level of Scottish Government involvement is it significant is it light touch is it well our core our core involvement personally is with the third sector division and largely at the moment through the 10 year social enterprise strategy in the budget beside that I would say it was significant and substantial nothing's perfect but it's the envy of a lot of other countries the level of support and specialism we have less so funding but certainly support learning leadership that Rachel mentioned things like that it is enviable I think it's I could say it's at the right level to give more please but there's always a need for more I would certainly be where I think we're in a very very supportive period at the moment with the Scottish Government in my view I mean certainly when I am in Europe or in America whatever and I talk about the support that we have in Scotland people are generally very envious of the support that happens or in England and colleagues and enterprise roles with universities in in England are really amazed at what we have and envious of what we have we just come back to the policy question you asked me earlier I think one of the challenges with the silos is people have individual targets and people people are not set targets which actually you know so or not even targets but objectives departmental objectives and people are very focused on these individual objectives without that kind of recognition of what their colleagues in the different department are doing it's a challenge that you see in any agencies and it's a challenge that you sometimes see in businesses as well but it seems particularly in public institutions I mean universities in particular we're often introducing people in different parts of university who didn't know of each other who are actually working in very similar things so so what can be done I think actually the enterprise and skills reviews is a big step in the right direction I think if you've got people at the top levels talking to each other is great but the next you know you need to have the lower levels equally talking across across divisions and across departments and being actually actively encouraged to collaborate internally as well and I think that would go a long way to solving some of the silo problems how effective do you think business sport activities are in delivering local economic growth is there any measurement I mean certainly from a from a creative industries point of view there's very little measurement that's a that's a national problem we don't have as much data as we we need to have so how do you measure success so we we measure the impact of the services that we provide on on the individuals we work with the journey and and it depends what the definition of success really is if the definition of success is high growth if the definition of success is more employed employment opportunities if the definition of success is internal and international trade the the pace of which the individuals we work with operate at can sometimes be too fast for the structures to keep up with so for example we've got a lot of people in and around the baros that are doing great trade great great trade they're employing local people and collectively it's having a really big impact is it and we need to sustain that it's not having the economic growth impact that it can have and and that's two or three or four or five years away but at the moment it's kind of under the radar and it fits brilliantly with the approach that we all want to see it's regenerating the area it's having an impact on on people who thought they were unemployable being employed it's having an impact on new businesses coming to the area therefore new people are visiting the area the whole thing is just having a much more vibrant feel so we can measure the impact of our involvement there is that service that support service having an impact on economic growth in a significant way not at the moment and it can be very difficult sometimes to to justify that when you're in when you're when you're delivering those kinds of services and because we are specialist support we can see the potential in that and back that idea and make sure that idea can travel and I don't think the general landscape would have we did that as about a consortium I don't think the general business support landscape would have been as keen on seeing those activities happen because they were not hitting several measurements quickly enough it might be worth just mentioning sorry just really briefly that in our social enterprise world what's been happening relatively recently is they've done a social enterprise census slot is not perfect but there's been two done so far in the third one due next year they're done every two years at the moment and so I'd sorry I don't have the statistics in front of me but there's been some social enterprises closing some opening it's gone from five just over 5000 three years ago in last years notice it 5600 social enterprises there's been a growth of turnover that's quantified so if you look at those social enterprise censuses there's two being completed and one to be done next year asking the same questions around turnover profit margins numbers of staff local economic development thematic development so it spits creative industries health and social care it splits it you can have a look at the comparators over the years so we're certainly beginning to see a gradual increase in turnover profit and impact locally so that's something you might want to write into the committee to either provide or provide a link to it and indeed on any of the other questions if any of you wish to write in with further information on the issues raised today there are other committee members like to get questions in Dean Lockhart. We've received feedback from other witnesses in terms of the tension sometimes faced between the need for general business support and specialist support and I think you've touched on it before but I'd like to take that maybe a bit further and ask each of the panel members how you balance the need for general support and specialist sector support and perhaps provide specific practical examples of how you have achieved that balance of general support and specific support thank you. I mean suppose we we've certainly seen that change and we have that we have our own business advice of change remarkably over the last few years I've been in the organisation we had very generic business support advisors because that was what we were very demand led so we're a social enterprise and we sell our service to our customers so we just provide what they need really. Supporting somebody with a business plan was very straightforward because people didn't really know what that was well now they do I've had to change our staffing structure on the left so we now have a lawyer and an accountant and on our team which we never had before so we have had to significantly increase the skills level on our team because the demand from the sector is specialist and I mean maybe Rachel can comment more on the sector specific because we are not sector specific so we work in partnership with community woodland association community transport association and use their specialism as partners in the support we provide I suppose where we are come is more those broad specialisms and if you're looking for one example for instance we procurements quite significant in some of our sectors not all but we have had to develop a skill and some support around the detail of 2p transfer because people were simply going oh there's there's a piece of what we can do the government's telling us to tender we'll tender and we can deliver that work and they were seeing the clause that said 2p transfer is eligible here and they didn't know what it was inflict across it so we're having to provide quite a bit of support to make people understand the implications of that so that kind of thing around that around 2p transfer and that's just one example of quite a specialist bit of support we have things like that to those kind of things so those cross-cutting specialists are things that we have had to develop so people are no longer looking for just a business plan they're now looking for very specialist cross-cutting support but we deliver less thematic support which might be Rachel. So we don't do any general business support at all I mean everything we do is specialist and saying that people come to us at the start of their journey because they have a particular question or a particular idea they want to develop. One of the challenges that we have though is you know we are well the main challenge we have is we are tiny in comparison and unlike colleagues here we have a very small team we have two in-house advisers and we then use specialist industry associates to bump that up and so we are not able to to meet the demand of the enquiries that we have but we always pass people to business gateway if it is a fairly straightforward idea if it is something that somebody wants to set up they want that in a band they want to set up the structure around them they've got a bit of an idea a plan it doesn't require specialist support because it's a fairly vanilla investment then that's straightforward and we would always do that. Where it's interesting and just as an example there was a fashion brand that wanted to make high-end tote bags out of recycled fire fighter hoses so if you can imagine going to a general support advisor to say I want to do that plus I want to be a social enterprise plus I want to donate 50% of my profits to the fire fighters fund and I want to be a global business by year two you can imagine I'm sure the response that would get that is now a incredibly successful social enterprise called Elvis and Cress does exactly that is a partnership with Burberry Cameron Diaz has bags they're on the front page of American Vogue so it's that kind of thing where the starting point often people don't necessarily understand but that's a multi million pound business and we would be delighted to be supporting that from a specialist point of view and making them making those those inroads with that but if that person goes to general support they get lost so I think I think it's really it's kind of it's it's known when to intervene and when not to sure yeah no I would agree with was what Rachel's saying it's about knowing when to intervene and when not to so as I say we work with people from early stage ideas and sometimes it's an opportunity that we've recognised and actually the business idea can actually take some time to develop from that so our specialist advisors can do that kind of coaching and the advice to get them to that point but then they will we will refer to business gateway for some of the vanilla support which is which they need which is great it means our guys can focus on the things that are really different and make sure that they get the right kind of vanilla support that's needed but it's also we also get support from private sector so we have students who have ideas that potentially need patent protection like IP issues so we have specialist professional services that can provide that or professional legal services that can provide the right support to set up a business that wants to be basically a global business right from the beginning so getting all these kind of elements right at the beginning so it is really a case of having it's about I suppose to be every every business needs some bespoke advice and support somewhere maybe 80 90% vanilla like everybody else and we'll do very well through business gateway others are completely the opposite only 10% it can be that basic so it's having that person at the right time and it's through the specialist organisations that can do that really okay thank you very much just a very quick supplemental later today in the chamber we've got a debate on digital opportunities how to take forward the digital economy can I ask each of you how if a company or business comes to you and it looks like they need an e-commerce platform or a digital platform to trade globally or engage locally do you provide that specialist digital advice or where do you signpost them to get that specialist advice so there's three things we do yes we can provide that advice in house we have a series of industry associates who are leaders in their field in that way that's almost like a mentor body system yes we would also refer to the appropriate scotland price support although like my colleagues have said that can be patchy and that's quite difficult to navigate and then thirdly we do a lot of private sector hookups as well and that is where the the we find want some of the most robust knowledge is is shareable and people do want to make other people successful and there's not it's not as competitive as people might think the interesting part is what kind of digital though is it digital for digital sake is it a digital healthcare platform is it a digital trading platform there's a whole range of different opportunities and a whole range of different technicalities that need to be addressed there but certainly from our point of view a specialist that knows how to navigate not only the creation and the impact but also the future challenges of when things go out of date really quickly we sometimes find that the public sector support is even as fast as it is even out of date quite quickly within a quarter I think really briefly honestly it's a gap it's a gap out there in terms of the support we've talked a little around trying to access from scotland enterprise and it has been tough it's like I wonder if it's in there I've not quite gotten I mean I'm not quite happy to blame myself there I'm not wanting to cast aspersions I just I have struggled to find access to that for for our clients I think the route that works most effectively to be honest is actually not so much to look for support and if it was there would absolutely take it was to support clients that we work with to develop almost develop a brief to work at exactly what it is they're trying to do and spend a lot of time doing that because they might come saying I want to do this actually when you get into the guts of it it's not really quite that so spend a lot of time developing that days probably and then trying to help them to support support funding and investment and we have a number of different we don't have that in the house we have a number of different up technical coders so we then go to it with a very very detailed brief and a budget and commission that in the out in the digital sector it tends to be a very good to do that you know just really reiterate what they're saying but obviously the cohort that we work with our digital natives and it's going to be less of an issue for them but certainly one of the key things is probably the peer to peer support which if we're bringing them all together actually they learn as much from each other because as it says things move so fast but actually just simply working with somebody who's a few months ahead of them the businesses tend to be very supportive of each other thank you Gordon MacDonald thanks very much convener we've heard this morning that students find scotland a good place to do business and that in terms of the level of support it's out there if i've picked you up correctly other parts of the UK find are very envious of what goes on up here but in the same instance I think it was yourself Rachel Brown it said that Bristol and Cardiff have better support for the creative sector so how does Scotland compare with the rest of the UK or Europe and where are the lessons that we can learn and what are they from a creative industries point of view Scotland is growing slower than the rest of the UK the lessons there are probably threefold one we've not quite cracked the understanding of what type of investment the creative industries really needs in Scotland so that's a negative thing a positive thing is that the ecosystem is really strong the can-do forum is really fairly influential within the sector people people want to be part of that people listen to the other partners around the table so the ecosystem is good the challenges are that in certainly in areas of Cardiff and Bristol is that organisations like ourselves have collaborated together come up with solutions and the implementation of those solutions have been really quite fast pace of change absolutely everybody's feeling the pace of change with Scottish Enterprise at the moment and that's really positive but the pace of change isn't fast enough what's stopping that collaboration happening now and then rolling out the solutions you identify I'm not sure actually I mean certainly you know from our point of view resourcing is an issue we're tiny you know and we we we're funded or we're funded only by Creative Scotland and we're going through a transition at the moment so we're not sure who would be funded with going into next year might be nobody might be somebody so we're in that very kind of challenging position at the moment so resourcing can be quite an issue there's no doubt that with Cardiff and with Bristol they picked key sectors two back and then pushed that forward and everything dovetailed into that and it's almost like once they've conquered that situation they're going into another one and we've probably seen that with with social enterprise to be honest there's been a you know a decade of investment a decade of structural and political will to move that forward and we're all now reaping the benefits of that Scotland's got more businesses with purpose being created and evolved than anywhere else that's real really envious the challenge is is how you start when you start to flex around the edges how you then support that and if people are starting off as a social enterprise but they're a creative industry and they're flexing into our space how do we start to support that so I think I think we're we're maybe at some point trying to do too much and laser focus would be helpful I think also especially in cities like Cardiff and Bristol they've backed an industry like the creative industries which is a bit of a mystery in some areas and not quite sure what you're going to get but you and I always describe it as how much do you want a gold medal it's a bit like an Olympic gold medal you know what does it take to get that one gold would you need to put in at the bottom for it to rise to the top we're still a bit scattergun in the creative sector around that we've not consolidated everything yet and certainly you know you've created Scotland skills grant Scotland Scottish enterprise are still working out how they work together in the meantime the market is just getting on with it so it's a bit disconnected before I ask other panel members to come in what would you say the focus should be in Scotland in terms of the creative industries if you want that laser targeted approach I think there's two things I think there's the small and then there's a large I think we can get distracted in the middle sometimes so we have a huge amount of portfolio career people where we don't really understand the impact of that and a lot because of the VAT threshold people are counted and not counted and we're not quite sure of that landscape and we're not quite sure of that potential could there be really brilliant businesses in and amongst people doing their work absolutely so I think there needs to be a real focus on especially in the 21st century you know people are living and working completely differently the nine to five doesn't exist in our sector how are we managing that do we have enough space for that how are we supporting home working how are we supporting that entrepreneurial activity that can really be transformational and actually what's fascinating is those groups of people are hugely employable but they're choosing to be their own employer how do we support and capitalise that at the same time we don't really have enough investment in the system for the high large businesses we're still looking at that as a far too linear process so if you look at some of the people that Fiona's working with they can be going from zero to probably five six 10 million in 18 months and we just don't have the capacity to be able to support that so I think the solutions are very small entrepreneurial activity to be supported and really hot bedded in a way that makes us an envious place to be and then where people can see the high growth potential which is not the big it's not a unicorn it's not amazon it's not it's not that it's high quality impact industry that's doing something different the fintech sector is a good example where you're seeing some really innovative ideas but they're taken far too slow to get to ground because the money's just not big enough yeah i mean the money is the issue really um if you've got people that meeting the big investment then and and you know i used to be in the life science sector 20 years ago we were seeing the same thing um so it's not an easy thing to solve you get to a point where you need the the angel community is very good here things like scottish edge have really plugged a very useful gap that's been fantastic we send a lot of students in that direction for that money to get them off the ground but it's the ones that are then needing that kind of half a million a million a bit more investment very early on that's where you start to struggle and that's where they end up disappearing they go off to london or wherever in terms of learning lessons from other parts of the world or from the rest of the uk is there any anything you can point us to it's really difficult i mean you think you look at things like textiles in the states where they actually bring the investors in um so that the people like mine may actually weigh before they're ready for it get that exposure and they get the and the investors see these people with potential very early on i know that eie is trying to do that but i think we need more of that and eie is very specific as well um you need to see more of more of that happening more awareness of the talent that we have in scotland and exposure to the the the people with the big money really and that's that's the biggest gap in terms of business gateway and its transfer from scottish enterprise to local authorities we've had 10 years where that transfer has been in place um how effective has business gateway been over this last 10 years in your own sectors i think like we've all said it's it's patchy in places um some areas it's really proactive because the business advisors on the ground really get it and in some in some it's it's just not i think it's difficult having a general service um that each each geography and each local authority has its own characteristics it's its own challenges with business growth rate its own challenges um with regeneration with poverty with the whole range of different things certainly from a Glasgow perspective because we're based there you know the business death rate is really high it's hard to attribute why that is it's been the case for a long time we do know though and i'm sure my colleagues would would say the same we do know in a specialist environment from our perspective our business death rate of who we support is very low um because it's not general it's specific i think we certainly we've it's very it's very hard to answer because it was previously when it was outsourced beyond local authorities um it was very patchy and now it's very patchy but in quite a different way in some ways um i think that the i would say on the whole it has improved personally our experience has been better that's been embedded in the local authorities on the whole um i think one of the one of the issues we find with our client sourcing support from business gateway because of the unification it feels like it's been tidied up a bit um but that kind of single brand website phone number kind of stuff um it doesn't feel very local um individuals on the ground can be very good but the structure itself doesn't feel very locally responsive um and a lot of people look at that and think well that's not for me that's for like amazon and all those guys there's a real there's a perception issue i think so we have to often break through that i'll be saying listen don't worry it's genie smith up at five house she's lovely there's the phone number so there's a wee bit of bridge building sometimes um okay thanks so much John Mason uh thanks convener and really i think to follow on from some of the things uh gordon mcdonald was raising um the suggestion again of being a bit patchy around the country and yet at the same time you're saying it's seen as a kind of national brand um so i suppose first of all how are people as far as you know are they hearing about your business gateways i mean you've indicated that it's through yourselves in some cases you're pointing people to business gateway so are people not understanding what business gateway can offer are they not seeing advertising are they not seeing it online what's the problem there i think the problem is what i was referring to before is the motivation that you come in with from our perspective so i mean i'm speaking to a family member for example i was saying i quite fancy starting a new business i've got a couple of ideas business gateway is obvious obvious first port of call but the social enterprises certainly we deal with are not coming from largely not coming from the point of view of starting a business fear is probably slightly different but most of our guys are coming from they've identified a need and then they tried to work towards how do we solve that need in our community or thematic area and that begins to develop something that they want to become sustainable we need to generate some money or this is going to close in three years and that at some point down the journey that has become a business but by that time they're probably already had support from myself from just enterprise from maybe rachel from community transport association so they're already embedded in more of a third sector support network so um they won't they won't look for or see business gateway because on the whole they don't view themselves like that just one very brief example in a low time is short but you know perception is an issue i was down and never clied at a project who will never in a million years call themselves a business never they're a community project voluntary organization um but they get no grants from anyone they've got 200 000 pound reserves in the bank they made 35 000 pound last year 45 000 the year before they work with refugees they work with the poorest people in that community they run an amazingly effective efficient business and would they benefit from business gateway do you think they probably would but they would never they don't think of themselves that way do we need to change the name of business gateway or how do we get around that well that's the yeah or to change the name of social enterprise or do business gateway do business gateway need a bigger advertising budget to get their message out there i think i think one of the challenges is if is when people have good experiences and bad experiences so it's how people come to a service like business gateway if you're a creative and you've had a poor experience or a patchy experience any other creative person that asks you about your business journey will pass that on and that's what happens within the network if you have a great experience it's the same but because that's patchy it's very difficult to measure that certainly in the communities that we also work and support in where the young people may have not been successful at school for whatever reason but actually are hugely creative maybe they're brilliant dance DJs and are running a club night and it's doing great and they need to formalise that and be pushed into a business they wouldn't dream of going to business gateway because it's seen as an established or an establishment that doesn't speak their language so i think that it's a it's quite complicated it's a multitude of things so if it's so patchy around the country should we or somebody at the centre of the government or someone be telling all the business gateways of how 28 or how many there are to get their act together and to provide a very specific list of services would that be one way of dealing with this would that be effective though because it may be patchy just for our clients but that might be okay so i know that's contradictory but but actually could it be if it's patchy just in North Lanarkshire for example but they've been provided they've been signposted to a specialist service that that was the specialist service that you should have had all along it depends what you're trying to achieve with that and i think we've got 32 local authorities all with a completely different set of ambitious individuals that live within it what do we want to achieve by telling business gateways to change and to do that because would that would that be duplication yes i mean i think that this is one of the questions that we have as a committee is how do you want to try and make it uniform and maybe a little more more centralized but on the other hand we want to make it local and responsive and all the rest of it and i think we're kind of struggling to know what's the balance in there yeah absolutely that's tricky because i think there's a there's a tendency there certainly has been a tendency and maybe we're all a bit like this as humans i don't know but there's a tendency in sex to tidy things up and that's a bit of a mess out there and there are all these quangos and supporting which actually we're turning we're turning them into some kind of nice neat pipeline where people will come in here and they'll get it and people aren't like that and i mean our experience people will find the support they need at some point or other so in some ways it's just needed to be true to what it is and the crucial thing is then about access it's not so much about branding and unifying that but about making sure i mean we're only three of us here and there's you know there'll be a tiny number of there's hundreds of people providing business support so i think and it was mentioned i think earlier on that collaboration and intelligent cross referral is more effective than trying to sort business gateway if you like so that intelligent referral and better collaboration if we can make a bit of an effort to do that and some ways i think Rachel mentioned that's a little bit about space everybody's just too busy with no breathing space to be creative and start thinking above the parrot but i really haven't spoken to western barnshire business gateway and we're quite active in western barnshire there's a gap in me i need to take some time out to go and have a coffee with them but i don't because i'm not because i'm too busy so there's a wee bit around well the committee is very committed to western barn showers you may realise that that's fine okay well thanks very much that's great thanks all right um Jamie Hawker Johnston thank you very much convener i'm very conscious of the time so i've got two two questions really um one we've kind of touched on the transparency of business gateway in terms of the regional performance and process of its target setting so i'll be interested here kind of very briefly from the panel the type of targets that you feel would be appropriate for assessing um the success of business gateway and what they what they achieve briefly as i said before i think as long as we make sure the target isn't always financial growth is financial growth when it's appropriate but the target might be sustainability you know i think if we have us certainly businesses we work with they want to be there in 10 years 20 years 30 years but they don't want to be bigger but they just want to be doing what they're doing so sometimes that business support is supporting people to diversify and become more effective and cope with changes in the circumstances things we've talked about brexit and other changes in the economy um so sometimes that outcome is if they're still there 10 years time but they've only still got three staff and they're 50 000 turnover that's a success story um and obviously you would expect my perspective is without social impact without changing scotland for the better it's all largely pointless so i mean i know it's not the business gateway's job but really we do need to see more equalities you know we need to see less poverty we need to see more people in work who are struggling to get work we need to see refugees settled into their communities and contributing those are i'm passionate about all those things and we need to see business as a means to an end to achieve those things and i would certainly love to see those kinds of targets embedded in business gateways as crucial to that economic picture thank you yeah i think um one of the challenges is sometimes there's maybe too much pressure to start a business you know take the box of we've created a business and that could potentially lead to actually a higher rate business failure because actually people aren't ready to start a business but they've been encouraged to do that so the targets are a number of business startups that actually can be detrimental but i think the other thing that's come through loud and clear is that business gateway is part of a very very complicated ecosystem and i think to say that you know that there are specific things that they are responsible for and they alone are responsible for that's one of the biggest challenges it's why you know when we look at the economic impact of what we do at SIE it's actually very difficult because the people that we've supported that have done extremely well have actually had support from a lot of different agencies so you know it's Team Scotland that you need to give the targets to rather than any specific institutions which makes it very difficult and i think but it comes back to that actually um messie is not always a bad thing in fact messie can be a really good thing you don't want to be in a situation where there is a one-stop shop and everybody is expected to go through the same door and follow the same route i quite often use the analogy of not everybody is going to get everything they need from Tesco sometimes they need the individual you know the personal shopper and the individual high street specialist providers so how do you measure that? I agree i think so one of the key things that's also come through loud and clear today is it's about relationships and it's about developing those relationships and understanding what's possible with those relationships certainly from our point of view entrepreneurial activity and the impact of entrepreneurial activity from a social perspective from an economic perspective and a creative perspective and an environmental perspective is really crucial and some of the some of the measurements that we that we as specialist organisations put on ourselves very much link into that team scotland approach and it would be great if business gateway was was part of that rather than us feeling that we're quite far away from each other at the moment i don't want to get too much you talked obviously about kind of a messie approach so that might be a lot we'll start Dean on on cluttered landscapes if we're not careful but you know you both mentioned kind of you talked about referrals and how you don't get referrals from business gateway but you refer to business gateway and i think Rachel Brown mentioned are being under the radar if that if that kind of thing is happening is that is that i suppose being monitored by government in terms of the performance of the of the whole team scotland side of it or are we are we perhaps missing out on being fully aware of some of the things that actually do work very very very well because they are kind of ad hoc i think we're just an example we're a delivery partner in just enterprise the national social enterprise business support contract which is specialist to social enterprise i suppose and there is a kpi around numbers of cross referrals to business gateway and i think the ad hoc thing can be an issue because you know we're certainly often contract manager will say okay i'm a wee bit low on this one and oh goodness yeah i forgot to tell you because you just in your day to day work you lift the phone and you speak to people and just monitoring that is quite can be quite challenged but i know that's a kpi in that town and i think they're very keen that that cross referral from business gateway to just enterprise and others continues and grows just last last question then about 15 million is spent on the kind of core services of business gateway do you think that represents value for money currently our turnover is like 168 000 so i'm probably not the right person to ask em i think that i think value for money is relative i think i think it's about do we really know if we're going to be serious about business support across the country do we really know the needs and wants and the understandings of all the businesses that we're creating and the supporting and the individuals we're creating and supporting and i think for for our perspective certainly for our sector you know our sector is growing slower than anybody else in the UK our sector needs a kind of varied approach like everybody else's does and we just feel that we're too far away from all of the all of the support that could be possible i think that's probably the the fair answer i don't know whether it's good value for money there was a question about whether we should be advertising more about business gateway but actually perhaps one of the ways to advertise business gateway is actually to put the money into instead of advertising campaigns put the money into some small organisations that feed into and refer to business gateway could be a more effective way of reaching the people that need to be reached rather than necessarily the more convenient and i speak as a marketer and you know rather than more conventional marketing and advertising of a service is actually how do we reach need to how do we reach and get the message to the people that need to know about it and actually it's probably more word of mouth peer to peer and actually putting some of the money instead of in advertising business gateway into these smaller specialist organisations who will then refer the right people at the right time could be more cost effective way of doing things i was just thinking if it was 14 instead of 15 and you just gave a million to us we would do loads of great stuff with it and you'd hardly miss it i think in terms of best value i mean i literally i literally don't know you know i literally don't know there's i mean there's obviously as i've said social enterprise development the strategy there's money against that there's money against business gateway there's not very much money in the culture enterprise office but there is money you know there's money split if we spread it all out on the table i think to be honest it's a hard question because we would have to look at it and as you do in parliament you would have to look at in the grand scheme of all the spend in scotland um i am not meeting a lot of business gateway advisers who are sitting twiddling their thumbs um i don't know about but honestly i don't know because i haven't looked at their impact 15 million doesn't it doesn't seem a massive amount in terms of promoting the scottish economy at a local level so he could tinker around the edges by removing some funding or increasing some funding but i don't know is the honest answer but it doesn't seem ridiculous to me thank you very much all right thank you very much and um we'll leave it there and i'm sure we'll find the money uh not uh the missing money or not lose lose the money and uh thank you very much for coming in and we'll move on as a committee to item three as our witnesses um leave us um item three is consideration of three proposals by the scottish government to consent to UK government legislating using the powers under the European Union with drawl act 2018 in relation to proposed UK statutory instruments uh the first of these united kingdom statutory instruments is the provision of services amendment etc EU exit regulations 2018 um the provision of services regulations 2009 by way of explanation established the legal framework for the UK's membership of the EU single market and services the proposed statutory instrument would amend those regulations to reduce the scope of their application in the event of a no deal with the european union secondly the CRC energy efficiency scheme amendment EU exit regulations 2018 um provide for a scheme which is UK wide to incentivise energy efficiency the proposed united kingdom statutory instrument would ensure that exemptions defined in EU law continue to be available between exit day on 29 march and the closure of that scheme on 31 march and finally the inspire amendment EU exit regulations 2018 relate to an EU directive which established a european spatial data infrastructure with an aim to improve environmental policy making the proposed statutory instrument will correct deficiencies that would arise or will arise from exit from the european union now the notification for these regulations indicates that they are all category a proposals that is to say they are technical with minimum policy choice or only one obvious policy solution is the committee content for these matters to be dealt with by statutory instruments at Westminster thank you and if since the committee is content i will write to the cabinet secretary and the relevant ministers to notify them of the committee's decision and we'll now move into private session and we'll have a short break