This is my first post on Exchanging Thoughts, so please be gentle with me, my name is Chris Norton and I am Director at Wolfstar a public relations and social media specialist. I have been working with Helen on a number of things over the last eighteen months and from now on I hope to be teaming up with her to share my thoughts and tips for businesses.
On Radio 4 on Friday morning, Evan Davies discussed the fact that there is very little awareness among small businesses when it comes to the Enterprise Finance Guarantee (EFG) Scheme, which is what has inspired my post today.
The Enterprise Finance Guarantee Scheme aims to motivate lending to SMEs which are currently struggling to secure finance from banks in the current climate. To me this sounds like a good idea – we could all do with some help with our cashflow.
In my opinion, the scheme sounds ideal for SMEs feeling the strain under financial pressure. However, Mike Symes of SME Business News suggests that some banks may not be wholly behind the scheme or have very little product awareness. He writes about the experience of Joanne Ward of Wesley Services in Leeds:
“Joanne Ward, the company secretary and financial controller, attended a meeting with her bank manager to discuss renegotiating the firm’s overdraft. When she mentioned the EFG, Mrs Ward was shocked at the reply she received. “He just said: ‘We don’t like these schemes and we’re not interested in them.”
This is further emphasised by a recent article on Times Online, which suggested that banks are “not up to speed with the parameters of the schemes” and “are still being very harsh with small businesses.”
In the piece on the Today Programme, the person being interviewed did say that the lack of visibility of the scheme is the reason why a lot of small businesses hadn’t secured any of this funding yet. So, although the scheme seems excellent in theory, it is yet to be seen whether it operates well in practice. I would be interested to hear the experiences of other SMEs who have enquired about the scheme – is it any good?
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