Cavendish Micro-Business Productivity Boost Project

"This trial is led by Cavendish Consortium (trading as Cavendish Enterprise) with work subcontracted to four delivery partners we have an established relationship with (TEDCO, Enterprise First, Business West & Nwes) and also OMB Research. We will be collaborating with The Enterprise Research Centre (ERC) for the evaluation of the Randomised Control Trial.

Our goal is to identify a cost effective, yet productivity enhancing programme of business support for SMEs which can be run at scale throughout the country.

Our experiment addresses a key finding from a large-scale NESTA research study in 2016, namely that new firms created after the recession have dragged overall productivity down. And that slow productivity growth within firms is the main factor responsible for the UK productivity puzzle.

We believe Tony Danker's statement (Be The Business, June 6th, 2018) that world class leadership and management practices have been shown to boost productivity, to be true. We believe that if we can select the right businesses, take them through the right process of embedding effective leadership and management practices, we will demonstrate a clear improvement in the productivity of the participating firms. We believe that our innovative diagnostic and our novel approach to business support will have a significantly greater impact on micro businesses than traditional 1:1 business support.

We will run a randomised control trial over one year, with six months treatment time and six months evaluation time. The control and treatment groups, each of 150, will come from an existing cohort of growing micro-businesses from the Start and Grow programme. 150 micro-businesses from the general population will form an additional control group. The Start and Grow cohort is useful because:

1) A problem faced by start-ups in the UK is that many do not make it past three years. Our Start & Grow cohort are businesses aged between 1-3 years.

2) A challenge in policy development for start-up support is collecting rich data on start-up businesses over a longer period of time. We already have relevant data for the 300 S&G businesse, enabling richer data collection.

3) The typical S&G firm size is 1-9 employees. The Be Business Initiative is focusing on firms sized 10-249 employees. We firmly believe that rich data and insights on how to boost the productivity of micro-businesses, of which there were 1.11m in 2017, will be highly useful for policy development and future sound investment of UK taxpayers' money."