Bridging The Gap

Today we are proud to announce thestudio Director and Co-founder Emma Jennings made it into the House of Commons!

Over a spot of breakfast, the IPT (Industry Parliament Trust) hosted a meeting addressing and recognizing the vital role small and independent businesses play in the UK’s overall economic growth and wellbeing. Acting as an intermediate, the IPT bridges the gap between parliament and businesses, through encouraging insightful exchanges to promote an improved understanding for both factions.

With talks of business expansion, current government opportunities available and the biggest challenges faced by SME’s, support was today’s topic of choice. After all, there’s nothing more efficient than working together towards a shared ambition.

Emma said after the event this morning …

“What an opportunity to be invited to such a prestigious venue where you get to speak and hopefully influence government policies of the future. Around the table the main topic, was definitely providing “support” and how is the existing support “signposted” to busy business owners to access it?

From the academics and MPs around the table it was interesting to hear them talk of “aspiration” being the biggest driver in small business growth. From experience I know thestudio has no lack of aspiration!

What we do lack, as a “service and hospitality business” is access to government funds that support our growth, we have borrowed a substantial amount of money to enable our successes to date and mostly at director level risk in term of guarantees.  I asked for encouragement in more of that aspiration and ambition, by mitigating some of the personal risk we always have to consider in any expansion of our business. More sensible and accessible funding please!

Also I was very interested to hear of the demand around the table of putting “entrepreneurship” as a curriculum agenda in schools – show young people that your own business is a career choice and support this at the grass roots. As a business we are extremely supportive of mentor programs and wholeheartedly support the next generation and giving something back.

And finally … a big message was consistency. So many initiatives come and go for businesses that it is challenging to make long term plans. In the 10 years of thestudio’s trading history we have survived some pretty stormy seas, we are have been resilient and come out the other side and are excited for our future growth, BUT we do need some stability in the economy, which could of course take us onto another very hot and current topic …. But for today, it’s back to the real world and the business of running our business!”