Crisis at business support agency: no news there, then…

I can’t say that I’m even remotely surprised by this story from the BBC:

Crisis at business support agency: Scores of people in Gwynedd owed money by an enterprise agency set up to support local business are waiting to find out more about its future.

The story is referring to Antur Dwyryd Llŷn - and although I’m no Welsh linguist, I rather suspect that this is the Welsh for ‘Business Link‘. If you’ve got a room full of small business owners and entrepeneurs, then the quickest way I know of getting them to present a united front is to ask the room of the opinion of Business Link. Almost without exception, you’ll hear a chorus of tales about incompetence, poor advice, missed opportunities and wasted money.

When we first had the misfortune to deal with them, I initially wondered if we were dealing with a one-off - but sadly, the barely-literate 22-year-old fresh graduate who was assigned to ‘advise’ on our business plan wasn’t a one-off. Quite what value he was going to add to a firm with people who’d been working in the industry since before he was born was unclear - but then that was far from the only thing that was unclear. We gave up trying to decipher his letters.

That’s not to say that Business Links aren’t good at anything - they excel at self-publicity and ensuring a steady flow of public funding, usually European. Although it’s difficult not to be too cynical when you realise that there’s often revolving doors between the various organisations that dole out the money and those that receive it - after you’ve dealt with the various development agencies for a while, you quickly realise that there’s a pool of individuals who seem to spend their (semi) professional lives flitting from organisation to organisation.