This was one of those events which looked good on paper but didn’t quite deliver.   ‘Speed presenting’ (ten minute slots each) meant a lot of ground was covered but you suspect left the audience more confused than when they started.   Growing Business Fund vs. Grants4Growth anyone?

If this wasn’t the case then that’s only because the majority of the audience were presenters themselves and recognised the usual suspects from the funding circuit.  Small business people were few & far between (fifteen?) which suggests this event may have ticked a box in local government forms but not in many SME diaries.

Most compelling was Ann Arken from Specialised Print who delivered with the real conviction.  She spoke of real business benefits (outputs) as opposed to how much of our money funders had managed to spend (inputs).  When will the powers that be realise that SME case studies tell the story infinitely more convincingly than Local Government slide shows?

The one-to-ones at the end were a good idea and worked well.  But with over thirty thousand SMEs in Suffolk still to engage with it’s not a tactic that can scale up easily …   This type of Green Finance Circus isn’t the answer and new ideas are desperately needed.