Help to Grow: Supporting Business Managers

Strategy and Innovation

This module focuses on:

• Understanding innovation and its relationship to growth, profitability and productivity.
• Reviewing your business model and value proposition in relation to current and future market opportunities.
• Understanding how business model innovation can help you respond to, and recover from, challenges.
• Finding out about the UK’s innovation ecosystem.

Digital Adoption

This module focuses on:

• Understanding the benefits of digital adoption for SMEs in innovating business models and seizing opportunities.
• Considering what stage your business has reached on the path to digital adoption from digitisation to digital transformation, and identifying priority development areas.
• Understanding the role of digital leadership and considering digital enablers to achieve a transformational culture.
• Being alert to the risks of a digitised environment and ways to mitigate that risk.

Winning New Markets

This module will take an in-depth look at how a business has:

• Innovated its model.
• Developed markets overseas.
• Explored models to address opportunities in different countries.
• Adapted their business model and overcame challenges.
• How the experience encouraged them to innovate.

Vision, Mission and Values

This module focuses on:

• Understanding the strategic value of vision, purpose and brand, their link to the customer value proposition and role in achieving competitive advantage.
• Exploring vision, mission, and values statements and planning an approach for reviewing these in your business.
• Defining brand components and how they add value to your business and customers.
• Understanding the role of your business’s vision, values, and brand in organisational culture and employee engagement.

Developing a Marketing Strategy

This module focuses on:

• Further developing your customer value proposition and your business’s approach to marketing.
• Understanding market segmentation, targeting, and positioning (STP) within your business’s competitive environment.
• Considering the stages in the buyer decision-making processes.
• Starting to consider the benefits of database marketing.

Building a Brand

This modules explores how a business built a market-leading brand and continued to serve its customers’ needs through changing times. It also considers what challenges had to be overcome and how did the company stay true to its purpose and values.

Organisation Design

This module focuses on:

• Identifying growth phases and when and how it will be necessary to evolve the shape of the organisation to implement growth.
• Considering SME examples of different structures and ways of working and the implications for your workforce.
• Jointly with others in your business, reviewing skills, roles, and training to ensure the required expertise is available to deliver the growth plan.
• Considering structures and processes to facilitate agile working.

Employee Engagement and Leading Change

This module focuses on:

• Identifying appropriate strategies for leading change in an inclusive and engaging way.
• Planning to implement approaches that enhance employee engagement.
• Recognising the impact of your own leadership approach as a key enabler for growth.
• Being able to utilise tools and resources collaboratively to lead your team towards strategic goals.

High Performance Workplace

This module focuses on:

• Exploring an example of a company that has put employee engagement at the heart of their business and created an inclusive culture.
• The tools and ways of working are innovative and productive, and the business has achieved growth through the way it works as much as through what it does.

Efficient Operations

This module focuses on:

• Understanding the role of operations and how to take a systemic approach, aligning operations with marketing strategy.
• Analysing operations using a value flow map.
• Considering an approach to key metrics which engages teams and creates a culture of continuous improvement in value flow.
• Recognising how your operations improvement strategy contributes towards your Growth Action Plan.

Finance and Financial Management

This module focuses on:

• Using financial data to make informed decisions about future operations including identifying relevant financial metrics for monitoring growth and productivity.
• Understanding the importance of cash flow forecasting in managing crisis and recovery.
• Considering options for financing growth both internally and from external sources and being aware of where to source information and advice.

Implementing Growth Plans

This module focuses on:

• Developing priorities and a timeline for implementation, using your Growth Action Plan.
• Identifying the resources required to achieve the objectives in your Growth Action Plan.
• Embedding key management practices critical to growth and productivity in your business.