Mentors reach out to help small firms grow

By YOKE HAR LEE


Business In The Community aims to double the number of small businesses it helps.

The non-profit organisation provides free mentoring to owners of small business encountering problems.

Its new chief executive, Sarah Trotman, said Business In The Community helped about 3000 small companies last year.

"Given that there are some 250,000 companies, we have reached only about 1 per cent of the market ... I'd like to double the number of businesses we helped last year."

Ms Trotman says another focus would be to actively market the mentor service to small companies that often don't have time to think much beyond their day-to-day concerns.

Next week she will be out in Manukau, knocking on the doors of small businesses. This will help indicate if there is a need for a person on the ground doing the job full-time.

Despite the organisation's impressive track record so far, it does not yet have a proper system in place to track how well the client companies have responded to their mentor's help. Under the scheme, mentors, who are mainly volunteers with practical business experience, are matched with companies needing specific help.

The organisation can call on some 900 mentors around the country, along with 20 agencies to help coordinate the mentor programme.

Ms Trotman reckons one of the things that might be practical would be for mentors to have follow-ups with the companies they have coached.

"If we helped 3000 companies, it would mean each mentor had three jobs per year. It is quite feasible to [have mentors] call on the businesses, say six months afterwards. I am not sure whether it would be in the form of calls or visits or to write. But it is important to let the businesses know we are there.

"We are not doing enough in terms of getting a sense of how effectively we've helped businesses," she said.

Alison Quesnel, the former chief executive, had laid a good foundation for her to work from, said Ms Trotman, who had worked for many years in College Credit Management. She left to run her own business consultancy and used the mentor service, then became a volunteer mentor herself.

Ms Trotman said she would like to think that even if small companies helped by mentors managed to arrest decline in their business, or mentors were just helped provide an objective professional assessment for the owners, it would have been a meaningful contribution.

Business In The Community is a British concept started in the late 1970s. In Britain, its patrons include almost all the Financial Times top 1000 companies. In Australia, the scheme began in 1985.

It was introduced to New Zealand in 1991 by Dr Grahame Craig, a trustee of the Woolrest Foundation and the current chair of the Business In the Community board of trustees.

One of the New Zealand organisation's most loyal supporters is Sir James Fletcher, who believes successful small companies are vital to the health of large companies in the country.

Business In the Community's 172 patrons include Bank of New Zealand, Fisher and Paykel, Fletcher Challenge Trust, Microsoft New Zealand, the Tindall Foundation, Todd Corporation, Ports of Auckland and IBM New Zealand.

To qualify for help, a small company must be in business for at least six months and employ fewer than 25 people.

In the current year, Ms Trotman also wants to provide some sort of support system to the 900 mentors who volunteer around $600,000-worth of consultancy time to small companies.

There is plan, too, to set up a helpdesk providing online advice for small businesses seeking help before they are matched with mentors, Ms Trotman said.

According to a customer satisfaction survey management consultants KPMG did for Business In The Community, 89-90 per cent of the respondents said they would recommend other businesses to use the mentoring programme.

What many of the businesses surveyed found most helpful was that advice was given in a non-intimidating way.

For many, the business mentors provided an avenue for the owners to talk to someone apart from their spouse or business partner.