EOW Reflections: Changing the conversation

If there’s an elephant that needs eaten, you know the approach to take. It’s too big to eat all at once and has to be eaten a bite at a time. So it is with change and transformation of any sort. It comes to pass one step at a time. It’s iterative. It starts with a conversation between people who are passionate about the need for change and have a few loose ideas about how to achieve it. It moves on to a wider conversation, more people join in, the buzz grows and the conversation spreads. You start hearing things from the original conversation coming back to you, as the original idea and the subsequent iterations grow legs.

In the past four years, while I’ve been in the role of the Small Business Commissioner it seems to me the conversation has shifted. 

I remember clearly having to push back regularly against the idea that it really didn’t matter if payments were overdue because there were lots of cheap options for financing the business while waiting. I rarely hear that now. We have managed to get people including those running bigger businesses to accept that the finance options aren’t particularly cheap if your margins are already tight and you don’t want to put your prices up for fear of losing customers, and small business and micros in particular aren’t always able to find someone willing to finance their working capital. If the supplier is successful at finding the necessary funding it may well be at better rates than the credit card, overdraft or loan shark rates, but passing the costs on to the customer means everyone is likely to push the additional costs back up the chain.

We’re talking more about the mental health impact on small and micro business owners when payments are overdue or when they are presented with unfair payment terms by the customer. We know suppliers are fearful of negotiating better terms, or requesting quicker payments, or charging interest and compensation on invoiced amounts that are overdue, because they worry that the offer of work will be withdrawn. There’s always another willing supplier out there happy to accept the terms offered leaving you without work and in danger of becoming unviable. That has a huge impact on mental health and contrary to what many people think about business owners, very few sleep at night if they think they won’t be able to pay the bills and their vital employees. The fallout is anxiety and depression, stress, damage to relationships, possible loss of business and home, and ultimately in some cases suicide. There are increasing numbers of organisations springing up to help owners deal with their own wellbeing rather than just questions around how to market the business, increase sales and manage people.

There is also a different tone to the conversations around the support needs of small and micro businesses. We may not have succeeded in getting people to stop lumping together under the banner of ‘SMEs’ all businesses that aren’t the circa 7,000 large businesses in the UK. But increasingly I hear people talking about small, micro and sole traders as very different entities with different aspirations, ambitions and levels of capacity and capability. Whether they have one or 50 people they have very different needs for information, mentoring, coaching and funding. One size does not fit all. Nor does on size fit all when it comes to technical tools. Yes, it’s hard to cater for the different needs of 5.56 million small and micro businesses but it starts with that recognition that their needs are different and each is unique.

We’re changing the conversation. I can’t take credit for that although my team and I have been consistent in our messages for 4 years. We can only change the conversation in collaboration with like-minded people in positions to influence thinking. Thanks to all those who have helped us spread the word.  There’s still a long way to go but the conversation is changing, the language is more accessible, and the messages are more robust and accompanied by stories they stick. Let’s keep up the momentum.