Business Support

Fully-funded by Essex County Council and delivered by Let’s Do Business Group. Backing Essex Business work to support business growth across the county, promoting economic growth and creating jobs.
(available to businesses across Essex except for Southend and Thurrock)

They help small-to-medium-sized companies to grow, providing 12 hours of free professional advice on finance, marketing, and recruitment.

• 12 hours of FREE 1:1 expert advice from a business advisor
• Suppot to access business finance
• FREE workshops and events to aid business growth

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Businesses located in North Essex districts, including Braintree, Chelmsford, Colchester, Maldon, and Tendring, can benefit from our comprehensive support services to aid businesses looking to start and those hoping to grow.

Our team of experienced business advisors is available to offer personalized guidance, while our program of free webinars and workshops focuses on essential business topics including finance, planning, strategy and marketing.

These resources are designed to provide the help and support you need to achieve your business goals and drive your enterprise forward.

• 1:1 tailored advice
• Support to access finance
• free workshops and webinars on finance, marketing, and strategy

Blueprint for Business
Businesses in these districts can also access a dedicated business growth programme named Blueprint for Business.

Developed and delivered by a team of award-winning Business Coaches, Blueprint for Business provides learning opportunities you can tailor to suit your needs alongside expert knowledge. The whole programme is organised so that businesses can create a pick ‘n’ mix of activities, tailoring the support to their individual business growth goals.

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GET SET GROW is designed to foster business growth and innovation by combining the advantages of group business coaching with personalised one-to-one mentoring.

This initiative, delivered by award-winning business coaches from The Consortium, will offer invaluable support and resources for local businesses and aspiring entrepreneurs.

The programme will culminate in The Big Pitch, offering participants the opportunity to pitch their business ideas to a panel of experts and compete for prizes.

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Is your business located in Basildon, Wickford, Laindon, Pitsea, or Billericay?

Basildon Business Boost is an exciting business support and grants programme available until 31 March 2025.

• Peer group support and business coaching
• Web-based and in person workshops
• 1:1 support
• Drop in sessions
• £2000 business grants

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Companies in six regions will receive support through the Create Growth Programme to help get themselves investment ready.

A key aim of the Create Growth Programme is to support creative businesses to explore and secure commercial investment opportunities. To this end each of the selected regions will have a Programme of activity that will enable businesses to be ready for investment and facilitate access to  additional funding from Innovate UK and commercial investors in 2023 and beyond.  

Creative UK will be working with partners in three of the regions (North East, Cornwall and South East), to launch Programmes that are tailored to each specific region and the creative sub sectors based there.

Delivered in collaboration with industry experts and experienced entrepreneurs, Help To Grow: Management includes 12 weeks of in depth training, 1:1 business mentoring to help apply your learnings, and the opportunity to grow your business, fast.

The 12-week course costs just £750 and is 90% funded by the government. You can take part around your existing work commitments and access learning through a blend of online and face-to-face sessions.

Aimed at senior leaders in small and medium businesses, the course covers strategies for growth and innovation, leading high-performance teams and digital adoption, as well as financial management and responsible business practices. You will hear from inspirational business leaders and learn alongside local peers. You’ll learn from leaders like you with bespoke peer-to-peer networking sessions.

By the end of the course you will be able to take away a tailor-made plan and have the confidence in how to grow your business.

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Be the Business have a range of free resources, mentoring programmes, leadership courses and tech adaptation information to help ambitious leaders build more competitive, successful, growing businesses.

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Better Business for All (BBfA) is a collaboration between business and regulators to enable simpler and more consistent compliance with relevant regulation, ultimately leading to a safer and more profitable society.

This website acts as a one-stop-shop for businesses to check what is relevant to them and what to do about it.

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Available for businesses based in Tendring, Colbea helps you access the advice, training and support your business needs. This includes fully funded virtual business advice sessions and workshops to assist businesses of any age with planning, cashflow, marketing, business re-alignment,  and much more.

Their hands-on, interactive training courses will help you take proactive steps towards business success.

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The Federation of Small Businesses works to help smaller businesses achieve their ambitions. It ensures the voice of small businesses is heard at the highest level across the UK, as well as providing business services and products.

The Federation for Small Businesses (FSB) service partners offer services and products built from the ground up to help businesses spend more time focusing on running their business.  Learn new skills, attend events, grow your support network, and get answers from professionals on topics important to your business growth needs.

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NWES is a not-for-profit enterprise agency.  They provide total business support to boost self-employment and encourage enterprise.

They help young businesses to grow, offering support programmes, access to finance, and advice and training.

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Enterprise Nation are working with Amazon on a Small Business Accelerator programme.  Online learning is tailored to your experience level, with a comprehensive curriculum covering website building, selling online, social media, marketing, managing cashflow, selling on Amazon, and identifying growth opportunities.

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The Eastern Cyber Resilience Centre is an initiative between the police, the private sector and academia.  It works to help businesses protect themselves against cybercrime.

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If your business needs advice on product safety, fair trading , food or feed standards or other consumer protection legislation then Trading Standards is the best place to start. They are also responsible for explosive or petroleum licensing and feed registrations.

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ACAS offers guidance, tools and resources to help you keep up to date with employment law and good workplace practice.

They can help you recruit, deal with workplace contracts, manage absence or deal with flexible working or parental leave requests.

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Small Business Britain is the UK’s leading champion of small businesses, supporting all 5.8 million small businesses in the UK – no matter their location, their sector, or their ambition level.

Through a series of reports, events and campaigns, Small Business Britain champions, inspires and accelerates small businesses in the UK to foster growth and increased confidence

Sustainability Basics – This free programme (and community of like minded businesses) gives each entrepreneur the basics they need to supercharge their sustainability planning, reduce their impact on the planet, and turn their sustainability plans into fantastic commercial advantage. Small Business Britain | Champion. Inspire. Accelerate.

Small and Mighty programme – This six-week programme to supercharge sole traders and micro businesses, concludes with a growth plan to support the next year of business opportunity. It will be delivered entirely online, allowing access from anywhere in the UK with flexible learning enabling opportunities for all. Small Business Britain | Champion. Inspire. Accelerate.

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With a strong business focus, Innovate UK drives growth by working with companies to de-risk, enable and support innovation.

They connect businesses to the partners, customers and investors that can help them turn ideas into commercially successful products and services and business growth.

They fund business and research collaborations to accelerate innovation and drive business investment into research and development.

Their support is available to businesses across all economic sectors, value chains and UK regions.

They regularly have funds available to be used by UK businesses, dependent on eligibility criteria.

Innovate UK – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

Innovate UK EDGE is a key part of the UK innovation agency’s investment in innovative businesses that drive economic growth.

Each high growth potential, innovative business they support benefits from access to a dedicated innovation and growth specialist, who will work closely with the leadership team of a company to identify the most productive ways to accelerate growth.

Innovate UK EDGE brings a range of fully funded services to help ambitious, innovative SMEs scale and grow. They help businesses:

• Exploit innovation
• Enter new international markets
• Source funding

Innovate UK EDGE (ukri.org)

Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council  – the University of Essex aims to be the UK’s centre of choice for data research. They act as a hub of knowledge that reaches beyond Essex into a global network of experts, organisations and innovators. This ensures the far-reaching impact of their best practice models and concepts. Situated in the Knowledge Gateway of the University of Essex, they provide access to funding, training and world-leading expertise in data analytics.

Training to ensure the analysts use the latest data tools and techniques. From introductory to advanced levels, through to customised training, the analysts will acquire new skills, working with the company data.

Data Analytics Innovation Vouchers to enable the business to receive greater support and services from the Centre.

Research placements in your business to provide time, talent, and data analytics skills.

Partnerships to transfer cutting-edge knowledge from the University into your company for long-term benefit. These can run from six months to three years. Innovation vouchers may be used to scope out your requirements.

Subscribe to their YouTube channel to access free webinars from world-leading data experts and guest presenters. Topics include all aspects of data analytics as well as applied research across sectors.

For more information and to register for upcoming webinars see the following link: –  www.blgdataresearch.org

The Data Science and AI Masters Projects scheme is a new and exciting opportunity for businesses, public and third sector organisations to work with the Centre on a joint, data-related project that would involve the use of advanced data analytics.

Through data science and artificial intelligence techniques we will explore a problem that you are facing within your organisation and derive useful insights.

Thanks to our funded scheme, organisations will have access to the next generation of data scientists and artificial intelligence experts, dedicated to finding innovative solutions to the biggest challenges faced today through the use of data.

Find out more: https://www.essex.ac.uk/centres-and-institutes/business-and-local-government-data/data-science-and-ai-projects

Knowledge Transfer Partnerships /Placements– 3-way collaboration between the business, Uni, and graduate employee – spearhead new projects, improved market awareness, develop new products etc

Consultancy – provide academic consultancy for practical solutions to improve competitive advantage

Find an academic expert – SME access to their expert database across many sectors.

Knowledge Transfer Partnerships – ARU