by Festival of Enterprise
The Festival of Enterprise – the UK’s largest event dedicated to helping fast-track business growth for SMEs and start-ups – returns to the NEC Birmingham this October.
Strategy can be sidetracked in the day-to-day running of a business, and scaling up takes the back seat as you end up dealing with piles of paperwork, projects going wrong and an overflowing inbox.
This shows in the statistics – according to the ScaleUp Institute, scale-ups bring in £1.3 trillion of the £1.9 trillion generated by all UK SMEs. The remainder is brought in by millions of companies not making anywhere near as much of an impact as they could.
There’s clearly more than a few secrets business owners need to learn about scaling up. Fortunately, the Festival of Enterprise will reveal them all.
More than 150 experts in business growth will join the stage to share their secrets with other business owners. This is where you can learn from real experiences, hear how they went about getting the funding that enabled their growth, how they grew their management and delivery teams, the big obstacles they overcame and how they reshaped their plans as they grew.
Managing Director for the Festival of Enterprise James Ashwood said: “Over the past three years we have learned a great deal about the types of information and services business owners and CEOs are looking for to support their growth ambitions. This has enabled us to create such an exciting programme.”
“Not only are we offering world-class advice from business-growth experts, we are also offering real-life case studies from successful entrepreneurs who have the achievements and battle scars to speak with authority about what it takes to innovate and succeed in today’s business environments. This really is an event not to be missed.”
Entrepreneur and start-up specialist Piers Linney has joined the festival as one of the speakers. Linney is perhaps best known to the public as a “dragon” from BBC2’s Dragons’ Den and for his appearance on Channel 4’s The Secret Millionaire. He will be sharing his no-nonsense business advice with aspiring business owners. “I’m delighted to be speaking at the Festival of Enterprise, which is providing brilliant advice to help businesses grow,” said Linney. “I’ll be talking about my #Startup with Piers Linney course and look forward to sharing this with you all at the NEC in October.”
The exhibition part of the festival will be packed with everyone from small solutions providers for specific problems to tech giants such as Google, LinkedIn and Dell.
Speaking about his attendance at the event, Google’s Product Marketing Manager David Taylor said: “Google Cloud is excited to join the Festival of Enterprise with its focus on strategies to scale up. Google Cloud offers the tools needed to transform the way businesses work and to help them build a modern infrastructure that will scale with them. The Google Cloud team will be hosting a full agenda of seminars on how some of our customers have transformed the way they work with G Suite and how this has helped them to rapidly scale their businesses.”
The Festival of Enterprise is designed to provide the owners of established SMEs and start-ups with the tools and information they need to achieve fast growth. A day at the festival will put business owners in the “ideas zone”, and help them refocus on the strategic issues that affect growth.
The Festival of Enterprise takes place at the NEC Birmingham on October 23-24. Free entrance passes can be obtained here.
Image provided by Festival of Enterprise