World class small businesses need world class support

Aidan Harte, owner and managing director of one of the leading small business training and consultancy firms in Ireland will be visiting Malta to meet representatives of newly set up Malta Enterprise. He will be giving a talk on Creating Top Class Business Support Services tomorrow at 5.30 p.m. at the Metco offices in San Gwann.

The structure of the business environment in the Celtic Tiger is similar to most in the developed world with over 95 per cent of companies being small businesses, employing fewer than 10 people.

They are the back bone of the economy despite our having so many larger international companies with huge facilities in Ireland. The population of the Republic of Ireland is about 3.8 million people, with a further 1.5 million in the North of Ireland.

Unemployment is only about 4.3 per cent and many businesses find it difficult to source labour, looking over recent years to foreign labour to fulfil their needs. Average economy growth is by far the best in the EU and the envy of most developed countries in the world.

We are a small island economy on the western shelf of Europe. To continue the growth of the economy our government has placed a large emphasis on manufacturing exporters and internationally traded services.

However, Ireland invests strongly in new small business start-ups, the growth and development of existing small businesses and the building of management skills, seeing this as the key to sustaining success.

In the words of a senior executive of Enterprise Ireland "to have world class SMEs, we must have world-class trainers and consultants".

The SME support agencies in Ireland do virtually no training themselves... they identify the needs, look at the big picture and subcontract the work to carefully chosen, competent and professional private sector training and consultancy providers.

Ireland has become expensive with a high standard of living. A large element of its economic success is attributed to its excellent education system at all levels from children through to its technicians and graduates, as well as its business development initiatives.

Many of its indigenous industry is now financially assisted to seek low labour cost counties to remain competitive.

The Optimum Results Ltd team believes that the government's strategic and carefully assigned use of EU funding over the past 20 years has transformed the country and its economy, providing results far superior to other countries that received the same level of EU funding per head of population.

We now have small businesses thinking and behaving in terms of having to compete on a world stage.

I believe that this fundamentally comes from civil servants who believe that this thinking, behaviour and standard is the only way to protect and compete in a very open economy, in all its aspects.

Success is and always will be about people at each and every level of a country's performance.

One of my favourite quotes comes from the boss of Excellence Through People in Ireland who says that he is frequently asked: "What if we spend all this money on our people and they leave?" with his answer being: "What if we spend nothing on them and they stay?"

From my experience, I have learnt to combine my passion for the development of peoples' knowledge/skills/attitude and behaviour with all aspects of the business through the optimum results SME business performance diagnosis and planning model. This model concentrates on customer-focused, sales and marketing of good quality, appropriately priced products and services with managers actually managing rather than doing lying at the heart and the core of SME growth and profitability.

Optimum Results Ltd has the international quality standard ISO 9000/2000, Ireland's national Human Resource Management Standard Excellence Through People. The company is an accredited centre of The Institute of Leadership & Management (the management division of City & Guilds) allowing them to provide internationally recognised, independent accreditation and certification for many of their training programmes in Ireland and overseas.