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Business Growth Strategy Focusing On Priority Businesses For Walsall

We will work closely with the new EDV to ensure the resources available to support business growth are focused and prioritised. This aligns to the approach set out in the West Midlands Growth Plan.

The type of support offered needs to be targeted where it can have the greatest effect. This means setting priorities that consider:

  1. Business Size: the nature of the support offered to businesses will differ dependent on their size, not least in terms of how able they are to source their own support.
  2. Growth Location: place-based growth priorities that any investment in business growth should align with. 
  3. Growth Focus: different businesses and sectors perform different roles in our economy and deliver different impacts as they grow, and this should be used to help focus the right support on where it can have the greatest impact. 
  4. Growth Potential: businesses with the greatest potential to grow should be a higher priority than those with little prospect of expansion. 
  5. Growth Ambition: businesses with unrecognised/ untapped growth potential require a different sort of support from those that recognise their potential and are already committed to growth.

Growth Focus

Innovation/Productivity Led Businesses:

These businesses have the greatest potential to contribute towards Walsall’s objective to ‘Secure More Competitive Economic Activity’ 

Businesses With Diversification Potential

These businesses have underexploited potential to grow with support and are in markets and sectors with potential to contribute towards Walsall’s objectives. 

Locationally Dependant Businesses 

Walsall should endeavour to retain and nurture these businesses in pursuit of the objective to ‘Grow the Business Base’. These businesses are often large employers and create significant numbers of good jobs for local residents.

Culturally Significant Businesses

The businesses can help Walsall demonstrate its distinctive and compelling offer to the outside world and so help drive up investor interest and potentially visitor numbers. 

Foundational Economy Businesses 

These businesses are essential to people’s lives and an indicator of a healthy underlying social fabric and an attractive place for people to live.

Understanding and Diagnosing Business Support Needs 

The new EDV is primarily responsible for Strategic Account Management of strategic scale businesses and supporting West Midlands businesses with high growth potential. We have a broad business base and do not have any singular stand out sector dependencies. Although we have businesses trading in the national and regional priority clusters and IS-8 sectors in the Modern Industrial Strategy, there is a significant amount of growth potential in other sectors and in the supply chains that feed into the IS-8. 

While innovation and productivity-led growth is an important factor to consider, the Business Growth Strategy adopts a broader approach which ensures the support offer can address other important factors in the growth agenda such as retaining large employers and the jobs they create, ensuring a competitive base of local businesses that serve local market and residents, and safeguarding businesses which help define our image to the outside world. These are all important aspects of a thriving, well-functioning economy and each have a role to play in driving the growth agenda. 

We will prioritise businesses based on the contribution they can make to growth rather than simply adopting a sectoral approach. This requires: 

  • The nature of the support to be configured to reflect the scale and the additionality of any public expenditure invested in them and the opportunity costs of supporting other businesses more in need. 
  • Aligning support to identified key strategic locations for employment growth, or to help address systemic socio-economic issues, for example there is a clear east-west divide present within Walsall, with the west of the local authority seeing significant deprivation.
  • Identifying Priority Businesses by Growth Focus. Different businesses and sectors perform distinct roles in our economy and deliver different impacts as they grow, and this should be used to help focus the right support on where it can have the greatest impact. We will prioritise businesses on the basis of the contribution they can make to growth rather than simply adopting a sectoral approach. 
  • An intelligence-led approach is needed to identify businesses with growth potential. According to the Growth Flag business intelligence platform, there are around 1,000 businesses registered in Walsall (about 8% of the total) that demonstrate signs that they will grow by 20% in the next twelve months. The Growth Flag data set also identifies businesses demonstrating signals of financial distress, of which there are ~1,600 (12%) businesses. 
  • A focus on each business’ growth ambition. Support should be configured around the current and future ambition for the growth of each business / entrepreneur. Those with low levels of growth ambition may be a low priority for support, particularly if their future growth potential is also limited. Businesses with high ambitions may also not warrant a lot of direct support as they are likely to be on their growth journey and able to progress well without much assistance. In between these poles, we will find businesses where they can make the difference by getting them to increase their Growth Ambitions.