February is an exciting month for us at the BEC – it is our 8th anniversary! If you are not familiar with our history, then you will not know that the BEC spun out of the local authority in February 2016 as a Community Interest Company. In those early days we just had the one building and four staff with me leaving my career in local government to focus on developing the BEC. When you live it, breathe it, and become consumed in the daily stuff, it is hard to focus on the achievements to date.
I like to use February as a period of reflection to focus on the outcomes and think about the next year, it is always helpful as it helps inform our budget for the next fiscal year so is very timely. It can also provide negative thoughts as an ambitious organisation committed to our values it can be easy to look back on what we did not manage or what could be better. A stark reminder is that this is 96 months and 417 weeks; and that Rome was not built in a day.
What has remained solid in those 417 weeks is our commitment to providing quality services to the business community in Barking and Dagenham. Whether that be affordable accommodation, training or one to one mentoring for businesses we are proud of the quality of service we provide.
We have found our place as one of the boroughs anchor institutions, and we have so many partnership working arrangements across a wide range of sectors. This makes the work exciting and affords us the opportunity to help shape initiatives for the future and the growth and development of the borough as well as the residents. Our strength is in our values as a company, and our Board and staff reflect this ethos through the work they do in support of the BEC. We are blessed with a range of freelance trainers, mentors, and support contractors, who are committed to the values of the BEC and deliver excellent support on behalf of the organisation. With our family run business approach, we know the value of looking after our own: colleague or client, we treat all those we work with as part of the clan.
What have we achieved in the last 8 years? well we have developed over 500 start-ups; this could have been more but of course covid and the cost-of-living crisis has meant a downturn in people wanting to start a business. We have however seen a rapid growth on people wanting to start a business for a social purpose in the not-for-profit arena, more about that later. We have invested over £750k back into the borough with our funded training and mentoring programmes which we fund from income we generate. We have gone from one building to three including our first capital project (still recovering from that one) and our two-pizza team has expanded to the point that there is now only one slice each!
What’s next you may ask; we are looking forward to working on Amplify a borough funded business support programme from UKSPF funding which will provide intensive support to businesses with growth potential. A generous portion (no pun intended) of the programme is working with food businesses which is a real growth area for the borough. To find out more about Amplify you can check out our website or watch this short video here.
Hot off the press we also have other exciting news, that from end of March we will be able to support charities, social enterprises, CICs, and startups in the not-for-profit world for the next three years. We are grateful that City Bridge Foundation can see how hard we have worked on this over the last few years and have granted funding for a more targeted approach. The project with no name …good suggestions welcome! It will provide a vital resource to Barking and Dagenham.
@CityBridgeFndn, @City-Bridge-Foundation, @UKSPF, @lbbd
