SMEs come up trumps in our poll

By Nik Askeroff

If Britain is to dig itself out of its current deep economic hole, it will be the country’s small and medium sized businesses that will need to shovel the hardest.

So are they up to the task? The portents are certainly good if our straw poll of business owners and senior managers attending recent Business Lunch Club meetings in Brighton and Crawley is anything to go by.

Of the 55 separate businesses represented at the two events, an impressive 65% said they were targeting growth of more than 5% this year with a further 15% setting their sights even higher at more than 20% growth. Just one in five were anticipating growing by less than 5%.

Admittedly setting a growth target is somewhat different to actually achieving it, but these figures demonstrate an encouraging degree of confidence, as does the fact that 40% of those we quizzed said they would be looking to recruit additional staff in 2011.

Even though this was hardly the most scientific of surveys, David Cameron and his government colleagues would be more than happy to clutch at straw poll findings such as this to support their contention that their economic strategy is working.

And doubtless they would be even more pleased to hear that all those at the two lunches felt that the government was doing a good job – or at the very least okay – supporting SMEs. Not one thought they doing poorly.

Perhaps that has something to do with another of our straw poll findings which showed that only around 5% of the businesses had so far been badly affected by the government’s public spending cuts. Needless to say, that didn’t include the representatives of West Sussex County Council, Brighton & Hove City Council and Brighton & Hove Police who were guests at the lunches!

So far so good then. But there are still lots of hurdles to be overcome if the SMEs are to lead the recovery. One of the biggest is the difficulty in getting funding. Well over half of the business club members and guests saw this as their biggest barrier to potential growth.

Not far behind were the increasing wage pressure businesses are coming under as inflation starts to move up, and the challenge of returning profit margins to pre-recession levels. 

On the whole, though, the findings were fairly encouraging, even allowing for the fact that those companies who come to our lunch clubs tend to be the more progressive ones. The mere fact that they’re prepared to devote one lunchtime a month to networking and sharing business ideas and concerns with senior colleagues marks them out as being just the sort of forward-thinking companies that might just be able to help Britain shovel its way back to better times.

July 2011