Small Business Case Study

This case study shows how the impact of learning and development can be evaluated in a small business over the short term.

Shirley is based in Cumbria; she and her husband moved there two years ago when he was offered a job in the area. It gave them an opportunity to move to the Lake District which had been a long term ambition. Shirley had worked in the chemical industry before the move to Cumbria. She had often thought about starting her own business but the comfort of her secure job had always pulled her back from the decision; now it was almost forced upon her. Shirley had worked in corporate communications for her former employer and her experience was in emergency planning, media relations and internal communications. She was given some freelance work by her employer and has since built up a good client base mainly working in media relations; 80% of her work is now for Cumbria-based clients. Shirley has achieved this in the space of 18 months.

Most of Shirley’s work has come from contacts she has made whilst networking and initially doing some work for no charge which gave her some good links into the local press. She has also done some voluntary work through Pro-Help, a scheme which pairs off professionals with voluntary organisations. Shirley is an avid networker and has concentrated on building up contacts to grow her business:

‘I did some work for free early on.  I came across a lady who was setting up a business, …., and I said well  your timing is right…. I am happy to do some press work for you for free …..and it was a good story, and I knew that it would help me get to know journalists …So that is what I did and she got some super coverage, partly down to me….and meant that the journalists had begun to know I am there.’

Shirley enjoys the variety of work that she now has but struggles with the unpredictability so getting the balance between generating new work and dealing with existing clients is sometimes a challenge.

There are eight members (all women) in Shirley’s set; all of the businesses were start-ups and working in quite diverse sectors. The funded, ‘official’ meetings with a facilitator had finished two months before but the members decided to carry on meeting on a monthly basis:

‘we had enjoyed the fact that we had really got to know each other very well and enjoyed just having that time to set aside to think about what was going on and to share issues with each other and to help each other out.’

Shirley spoke about how she experienced vicarious learning as a result of being in the set and how it was useful to set some time aside to think:

‘You tended to learn from other people issues as well as your own anyway, rather than it being just your bit and it was quite a good to think, I think that was the main thing’

Shirley gave an example of an outcome of her thinking time in the set:

‘I think one of the most useful things for me was at the very beginning of the new year we started the session by having us write down where are we, where do we want to be by the end of the year, what are the priorities for this year and I realised that I had not done that and yet in a bigger business of course you would do that, …(I realised that)I can charge very competitively (locally) …because it is slightly subsidised by some of the ..corporate work I do and I realised I had got to be able to …generate that corporate work …(because)without it the other work would be threatened ….looking back on it now I hadn’t thought that through’

Shirley kept returning to the theme of how action learning helped her to deliberately put time aside to think about where her business was going and reflecting on successes and failures and planning ahead. She talked about how, when she worked in a large organisation, there was a clear delineation between her work and personal lives but now that she ran her own business, life and work were much more integrated. This seemed to be the case for other set members too:

‘Sometimes some of the things we were discussing were as personal as they were about the business because it was hard to separate the two …it became quite personal'

A major learning point for Shirley was in a re-evaluation of her skills and the ability to view them as a customer might:

‘There was one fairly late night when I realised that something that I could do very easily (which) was a real problem for someone else …they were ridiculously grateful and it dawned on me that something like that that I take for granted.., it was actually something that other people didn’t feel they could do and having somebody suddenly say yes I can put that into words was like wow.’

Mutual support emerged as a key issue for this group; a diverse group of individuals working together, supporting each other but neither judging nor pushing each other into doing something they felt uncomfortable with. Running a start-up business in Cumbria can be an isolating experience: Shirley related how a few members of the set were farmers’ wives who had set up businesses through a dire need to bring more income into the home whilst their husbands continued to work eighteen hour days:

‘We …helped each other out and certainly a couple of people I think felt very on their own in their businesses.  … having the time to sit with people who are wanting to know  what happened about that and how is that going is good’.

‘.  It was that mutual support and feeling that you weren’t the only one with a problem, realising that we had several answers and none of them were right or wrong, just different and it was quite reassuring’