BUCKINGHAMSHIRE BASED

SALESFORCE.COM
CRM SPECIALISTS

, REPHRASE, TO DELIVER ADVICE TO HELP START-UPS GROW

Buckinghamshire
based Salesforce.com specialists, Rephrase, offer advice as part of new
£30m Growth Vouchers initiative

The programme distributes subsidies of up to
£2,000 for business advice

Part of a brand new advice marketplace aimed
at encouraging SMEs to take on good advice

Buckinghamshire based Salesforce.com specialists, Rephrase are set to
deliver strategic start-up advice as part of the Government’s £30m Growth
Vouchers Programme.

Frazer Lewis, founder of accredited small business IT and Web advice
firm Rephrase in Chesham, Buckinghamshire is part of a new scheme that aims to
help start-ups and SMEs to take on board advice at an early stage via a
purpose-built marketplace.

The new Growth
Vouchers scheme offers advice and guidance to businesses taking part and
subsidies of up to £2,000 towards the cost of that advice to successful
applicants.

The programme will
then monitor SME performance over the coming years in order to assess the
impact that advice has had.

Frazer Lewis said:
“If we can help start-ups in the South East take their businesses to another
level by showing them how to take advantage of CRM technology, it will set them
in good stead to become sustainable businesses contributing to the long-term
prosperity of the region.

“The Growth
Voucher marketplace will hopefully mean taking advice becomes an integral step for
people forming a new business, leading to enhanced sustainability and economic
growth.”

The Growth
Vouchers programme is also being run as a randomised control trial (RCT) by the
Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Cabinet Office’s
Behavioural Insights Team. RCTs are widely regarded as a gold standard for
empirical research. This is the first time an RCT has been run on this scale and
aims to find out what sort of business advice is most effective for government
to support.

The marketplace is designed to make it much easier for businesses to
find providers of strategic advice on key topics like:

Improving leadership and management;

Making the most of digital technology;

Managing cashflow, late payments and
negotiating finance;

Marketing, attracting and keeping
customers;

Developing skills and taking on staff.

Businesses that have been running
for a year, with fewer than 50 employees, and have not paid for strategic
external advice in the past three years will be able to apply at

https://www.gov.uk/apply-growth-vouchers

They will go through a process which will
help them identify what sort of advice they might benefit from. Small business
network Enterprise Nation has developed a marketplace for business advice where
participants will then be able to find a qualified adviser at

www.enterprisenation.com/marketplace

The new
marketplace is funded by private sector firms:  technology specialist Toshiba, co-working
expert Regus, cloud-based collaboration and data sharing software provider
Citrix, telecoms brand Vodafone, cloud-based accounts, payroll software provider
Sage One, email marketing campaign brand Constant Contact and EDF Energy which are showing their support for small businesses
by backing the initiative.

It is also
supported by professional bodies including the ACCA, ICAEW, BCS, CIPD, CMI and
the CIM.

The Growth
Vouchers programme will run until March 2015. To apply for a voucher go to

https://www.gov.uk/apply-growth-vouchers

For more details
contact:

Frazer Lewis on 0800 1337 130 or by emailing frazer@rephrase.co.uk

Background Quotes

Emma Jones MBE,
founder of Enterprise Nation said: “This is an exciting initiative which could
help accelerate the growth of thousands of small businesses at a critical stage
of development – helping them to build long-term sustainability. At the moment,
access to business advice is sporadic and highly variable with no means
available to help businesses differentiate the good from bad. We want to
address this by building a service that establishes suppliers’ credentials to
offer advice from the outset and then continually seeks feedback on the quality
of those services for everyone to see.”

The platform is
funded by private sector brands.  These
are technology specialist Toshiba, co-working expert Regus, cloud-based
collaboration and data sharing software provider Citrix, telecoms brand
Vodafone, cloud-based accounts, payroll software provider Sage One and EDF Energy which are showing their support for
business by backing the initiative.

The scheme comes
in the context of record numbers of start-up businesses across the UK, with
more than half a million new registered companies expected by the end of 2013
for the first time.

About Enterprise Nation

Enterprise Nation

is a small business network with more than 75,000 members. Its
aim is to help people turn their good ideas into great businesses – through
expert advice, events, networking and inspiring books. Enterprise Nation was
founded in 2005 by

Emma Jones MBE

also co-founder
of StartUp Britain.

Enterprise
Nation is also heading up a new initiative which seeks to represent the needs
of entrepreneurs, called the Entrepreneurs’ Alliance.  It is an umbrella
pressure group that includes the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), the
Federation of Private Businesses (FPB) and School for Startups,

BusinessZone.co.uk

and
think tanks Centre for Entrepreneurs and The Entrepreneurs’ Network (TEN) which
between them represent 2.5m businesses.

Background quotes:

Citrix

Andrew Millard, senior director of marketing,
Citrix said: “Tooling small businesses with easy-to-use apps that enable new,
more flexible ways of working is very important to us at Citrix. We are
supporting this initiative because we want to encourage entrepreneurs to try
new technologies and access resources that can transform the way they work,
increasing productivity and improving competitive advantage.”