Business support 'bureaucratic'

Matt Burge, one of the trio, owns the Cardiff Devils ice hockey team

Three top businessmen have set up their own not-for-profit business support service because they say the assembly government's service is too bureaucratic.

Investment fund manager Paul Ragan, MSS group chief executive Bill Mayne and Cardiff Devils ice hockey owner Matt Burge told the Politics Show Wales public sector provided business support was being held back by too much red tape.

The three have launched a new service called Collateral Thinking.

The assembly government said that was not the experience of the vast majority of companies using their Flexible Support for Business service.

Paul Ragan, who sold his south Wales-based insurance company last year in a multi-million pound deal, said the present business support environment was "stifling".

"Over a number of years we've been frustrated at the lack of support, the bureaucracy and red tape," he said.

"If you're the man on the street, if you're the lady running a business in Abercynon, where do you go, how do you get the help?

"Nobody really knows. It's complicated, it's too bureaucratic and if you do manage to find out where you go and how you access this help, be prepared to wait for two, three, four, five, nine months depending on the support you need. There is no guarantee you'll get there either."

If I'm going to bring jobs to Wales it's very reasonable for me to ask for faster processes Robert Clarke, inventor

Fitness instructor and inventor Robert Clarke from Gorseinon, who is hoping to bring a new muscle-stretching machine to market, said delays in getting an assembly government grant had held back his business.

"It stalled the project for two months," he said.

"If I'm going to bring jobs to Wales it's very reasonable for me to ask for faster processes."

Mr Clarke's company Sportfit is now one of the first companies to receive support from Collateral Thinking.

"Collateral Thinking is born out of our frustration actually of being entrepreneurs in an environment that we don't think is naturally that suitable for business," said Mr Mayne, Chief Executive of facilities management company MSS Group.

"From our personal experience we didn't think there was a lot of support for us as we grew our businesses and in talking to other people that wasn't just us, that was a widespread view."

Cardiff Devils ice hockey owner Matt Burge, who is also founder of communications company Communications Direct, said they had set up the new service to pass on their vast business experience.

"My involvement really comes from my ability to build businesses quickly," he said.

"We've got a really good track record of being able to grow businesses fast from zero to £30m in just a couple of years."

Paul Ragan, who has an interest in 15 companies including a taxi firm and a manufacturing business, said the new service had been "bombarded" with interest from frustrated companies.

"As a businessman are you prepared to take your eye off the ball and put all this energy into something that quite frankly might not materialise anyway?" he said.

"We need to sharpen that whole process up and I think that's where we bring something very different.

"What we can achieve in a couple of weeks - in maybe three or four meetings - is something we'd compare to maybe eight or nine months of working with some of these other agencies."

'Form filling'

Brian Morgan, Professor of Entrepreneurship at UWIC, said the business support offered by the assembly government was "overly bureaucratic, top-down and lacking in real focus".

"Whether you want a £50m property award or a £2,500 innovation grant you all have to fill in this ream of paperwork and at the end of the day most of the people in the Welsh Assembly Government, and there are a lot of people there in business support, simply seem to be form filling, paper chasing," he said.

"We've had business connect, then we had business eye, then we had business gateway - all of these have come in, taken years to be introduced and now we've had this latest incarnation called Flexible Support for Business, which if you ask anyone out there I wouldn't think many people have heard of it."

The assembly government said: "That is not the experience of the vast majority of companies using Flexible Support for Business.

"Since the 1st of April over 6000 businesses have accessed support from the Flexible Support for Business Regional Centres and 7,000 individuals have accessed support from the Start Up programme.

"In a recent survey of the service 71% of respondents were satisfied with the overall ease of the application process and 88% of respondents were satisfied with the quality of advice provided to them by their Relationship Manager.

"All complete applications received for support under the Business Growth service are dealt with in 10 days."