I’m going to go a little off-piste from the usual round of industry tittle-tattle to do a little light swearing. If you’re of a sensitive disposition, look away now!
We’re in a world of economic shit. Good businesses are being driven to the wall by lack of access to credit… savers are being royally fucked over by a Government who apparently see their prudence as an affront to All In The Public Good policies… and, somewhere in a town near you the same government are busily taking money from profitable businesses and giving it to unprofitable ones.
We take on a few clients every year who have obtained ‘grant money’ from any one of a vast array of development bodies. These are unelected bodies who are given the power to disburse cash to businesses in areas that the Government wishes to see ‘develop.’ Examples near me include Business Link and Yorkshire Forward – but there are a big number of similar initiatives.
The way it works on paper is this: sometimes people with a good business idea can’t get access to credit or funding from a bank, and so the idea goes unrealised. Because of this, economic growth is stymied – especially in the crucial small business sector, from where a lot of innovation comes. The government therefore can step in and provide funding where the banks won’t. Furthermore, by targeting deprived areas, these grants can help stimulate economic activity in poorer areas.
Fucking rubbish.
What actually happens is this: good, profitable businesses and productive workers have money taken from them in the form of tax. This money is then channelled into bad, unprofitable businesses which go under anyway. All of this happens under an absurdly capricious and ill-informed bureaucracy which merely serves to make the whole thing more expensive.
A case in point. Currently in the studio we have a website for a company offering luxury travel packages – bespoke holidays for the rich, in effect. The market is ridiculously competitive to begin with. The big high street tour operators already offer premium packages. There are also well-established, massive concerns who operate solely in this market such as Kuoni. And as if that wasn’t enough, since the inception of the internets, you can now create your own bespoke holiday by booking flights direct from airlines and choosing your own hotels through services such as Expedia or even directly with the hotels themselves.
You don’t need a fucking marketing degree to figure out that going into this market is a foolhardy endeavour unless you offer something unique, or have tonnes of cash to burn while you establish a brand. Neither option is easy or cheap. Some ideas right off the top of my fucking head might be: holidays specifically catering for gay couples… holidays centering on food experiences… holidays based around natural wonders like volcanoes… hell, sex tourism, even. Anyone one of those might be achievable from a small start-up base. It would need great marketing and domain expertise but you could develop an offering that might not be mass market, but would definitely be sustainable.
Our client, by contrast, has two women, a 6 page website and £5000 of grant money from business link. Their angle? They don’t have one. They’re offering “luxury holidays”. Nothing in their website, literature or their own attitude suggests they will be able to make a go of this because nothing they’re doing or saying is unique. Most of the ‘destinations’ they offer through their site aren’t even populated with hotels. And the hotels they do have are offered up in a perfunctory two paragraph/3 image style. Not even a fucking map.
Fair enough, you might say, give them some good marketing advice for the £5000, develop a proposition and spend some time with them to get them onside and working towards some achievable objectives. Now, if it was their £5000, we could do exactly that. As it is, the money has to be spent according to strictures laid down by Business Link which are as follows: “spend this money on SEO.”
SEO is most assuredly not their priority. If we could successfully rank them #1 for ‘luxury holiday’ for that kind of money, they still wouldn’t make a single conversion (their website is *that* bad).
So Business Link have taken your 5 grand and given it to a business that won’t last more than a couple of months and specified that the money should be spent on about the least relevant service. In addition, to administer this money we have to leap through hoops that they have set in terms of actions, reporting and timescales. Does any of this add up to extra efficiencies? In that £5000, a few hundred quid will go west in creating the ‘correct’ audit trail to fit their stupid fucking, box-ticking requirements.
The next time Gordon Brown stands in his pulpit to lecture us on the evils of unbridled free markets, bear in mind that billions of your money is pissed against the wall on clowns like this every single fucking year. Unaccountable, pointless, waste.
#1 by Roger Thornhill at March 27th, 2009
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I’m listening and what you say is not wrong.
#2 by Real Oasis at March 27th, 2009
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Good to see Bullshit Link is still up to the same exacting standards that they were 10 years ago.
Nothing wrong with a marketing blog with a bit a swearing, in fact in the disastrously run country it’s becoming just about f*****g obligatory.
#3 by H at March 27th, 2009
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The big number to remember when you see stories like this is £3,791.80. Median earnings in the UK is just under £25k (more if you’re in the public sector, less if you’re in the private) so the median taxpayer pays £3,791.80 in income tax each year.
That means some poor bastard is working for nearly 16 months to generate enough tax for the nomenklatura to spend £5k on projects like this. If that poor bastard is you, you might want to do something about it….
#4 by David Gillies at March 27th, 2009
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Meanwhile Stuntman Dave and his hapless Tories are waffling on about a notional £2 billion that will supposedly be raised by not scrapping Labour’s new confiscatory 45p tax band. Even if this number were accurate (and it’s almost certainly utter cobblers) it’s the sort of cash that the one-eyed Scottish idiot and his bumbling sidekick Darling squander every 28 hours. It’s chump change. It’s a rounding error. But it will directly the penalise the very people we will need in large numbers to haul the UK out of the crapper. With a stroke of the pen the Conservatives could abolish all these development agencies and save 11 figure sums. But they’re too feart of the Grauniadistas and BBC scum, and they’ll bottle it (they could shaft both of them too, if they had a mind, by abolishing the TV license and banning public sector advertising in GMG publications, but that’s another story).
If I could summon the energy anymore, I’d weep.
#5 by Piggynap at April 14th, 2009
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You know what Paul? We should start that business we thought of – the one that’s like Interflora but with cakes for depressed people? Let’s get some Business Link funding to invest in a website and some SEO – at least that way we’ll get to spend our taxes on something fun and not just the latest help a chav scheme.
#6 by Frog at May 2nd, 2009
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…someone mention cakes?
#7 by Anon at May 15th, 2009
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My company investigated getting a government grant a while back — against my principles, but the shareholders demanded we at least investigate it. The kind of money we were looking at was in the tens of thousands, the business is a reasonably established one.
Firstly, we found that there are people who will help you get grants for a cut of the cash; this works for grants up to the hundreds of thousands.
The next thing we discovered is that for the grants we were looking at, you can get about 30% of your costs paid for a specific project. The catch is that the project has to provably be something you wouldn’t work on if it wasn’t for the grant. Now, I can see the logic behind that rule — after all, they don’t want to fund something that a business would do anyway, do they? Unfortunately the gov’t don’t seem to realise that what that means is that they will only fund projects that are not commercially viable.