What small business owners “need”

There seems to be an awful lot of people trying to tell small business owners what they need - the government, the Federation of Small Businesses, the IoD, the CBI, and various other august bodies.  And now celebrity entrepreneur, Doug Richard, has had his pennyworth. I'm more interested in what owner managers want. In a recent interview for the The Herald, Richard had another pop at government small business support schemes.  According to Doug, most of the £2.5 billion spent annually by central government seems to be used for advice schemes that are of little practical value.  What they (small businesses) need is much more straight forward training in business skills. Most owner managers I talk to (and I talk to a lot!) would agree that, once their business is beyond the very early stages, most government funded support schemes are ineffective.  Owner managers don't want to be advised about how to run their business by people who've come out of the civil service or large corporates.  In fact, given that most owner managers have high needs for control and autonomy (that's why they're owner managers!), they probably don't want to be advised (ie. told what they should do) by anyone.  And that includes people like Doug Richard and, indeed, me! At the same time, I'm not all convinced that straight forward training in business skills is what they need either.  More importantly, is it what they want? I believe that what most owner managers want is for their business to be different and better in future compared to today.  This might mean growth, it might mean better profits, it might mean more controlled growth.  It might be that they want to grasp a major opportunity that's coming down the track, or they face a major transition point such as a management succession or a generational succession in a family firm, or they might be beginning to think about selling the business.  From a personal perspective, they might simply want the business to be less reliant on them personally, or they would value someone external to bounce ideas off and challenge their thinking.  Or, and this is very common in my experience, they find themselves running their own business almost by accident.  By some combination of opportunity and circumstance, they've ended up running and owning a business.  It was never part of a grand plan and they never prepared themselves for it.  So, they go from day to day making decisions which feel right and which, most of the time, seem to work out well.  But, they feel like they're flying by the seat of their pants and they'd like some reassurance. These are real and practical aspirations and most owner managers will have their own particular combination of several of them - some about the business and some about themselves. So, in my experience, when owner managers look for help, they look for things which are very specifically designed for them, which are highly practical and which help them to address these real aspirations in the real world of their business.  In other words, they want help in actually bringing about the different and better future they want for their business and for themselves. And, while they like hearing how other successful owner managers did it, they want to make their own choices and they appreciate help in doing things for themselves, rather than being told what to do by someone else.  They don't want standardised, sheep-dip training in "business skills" which don't feel relevant to their situation.  They don't want to be patronised and they're not generally interested in "academia". Unsurprisingly, our business, Your Business Your Future, designs and runs programmes which are designed specifically for owner managers and which are entirely based around the reality of the participants' businesses.  They're not "training" in any conventional sense in that we don't set out to teach or train participants to do anything in particular. We set out with the very specific aim of helping participants to actually bring about the different and better future they want for their business and for themselves. So, we call them "development programmes". These are subtle and important distinctions - at least to us and to many of the owner managers we work with! And, based on the fantastic feedback we get from our participants, they seem to work! There's one point Doug Richard made with which I agree 100%. He added that "[small businesses] need the government to be an effective customer.  Small businesses would much rather have a customer than an adviser." And he's dead on there!