The last couple of months have been exciting ones for InBiz, the specialist agency which helps people set up and develop their own businesses. First, the owner, Terry Owens won a Queen’s Award for Enterprise and pretty soon afterwards the company gained recognition for the fourth time as an Investor in People to round off a decade of involvement with the Standard. InBiz enables people with bright ideas and an entrepreneurial spirit to turn their dreams into reality. Amongst its many successes is the development of the original template for what is now the national Job Centre Plus self employment programme. Its business advisers work in a number of contexts (including schools) to nurture the sprit of enterprise but perhaps their key role is that they provide good sensible advice and information to those who are getting started on the long road to business independence. As InBiz Managing Director Will Pratt comments, “A key role for our business advisers is to build confidence because that then feeds through to the businesses themselves. But in order to advise people effectively the business advisers have to be trusted – that’s their key attribute. They need empathy but they also have to remain objective.” First hand experience Most of InBiz’s Business Advisers have themselves been self employed so they can demonstrate to their clients that they know what they are talking about at first hand. In addition, by constantly working with successful start-ups the InBiz advisers are adding to their own depth of understanding about what success demands. As a result they have a growing resource of examples of success to draw on. The approach has obviously been successful because InBiz’s clients have set up over 18,000 businesses since the service opened its first office on Teesside in 1990 (it went nationwide in 1998). As a business which is itself all about people and their personal development InBiz saw from an early stage the benefits of Investors in People. It first gained recognition in 1997 but Will Pratt says that he is particularly impressed by the Standard in its current form. “I believe that working to the Investors in People principles has definitely been a major benefit to us. In particular I like the current version of the Standard which is directly aligned with how we aspire to improve as an organisation,” he says. “When I look at Investors in People I recognise that we need to be doing all of this anyway – we are not doing anything extra just to meet the Standard.” Believe your own propaganda? Given that InBiz has now been reviewed on several occasions you might think that the management had become a bit blasé. Not a bit of it. “You’ve got to keep checking what YOU are doing and it’s vital that the staff understand what THEY are doing. Like most successful organisations we are very busy and it’s easy just to focus on the day by day activity and never really look up at the bigger picture. In any case, I know that the biggest danger is to believe your own propaganda so I find it very valuable to have the Investors in People Assessor to come in and examine what we are doing. We value the Assessors’ comments and it gives us reassurance that we are still going in the right direction.” So as InBiz continues to go from strength to strength it can trust in Investors in People to help keep it on its toes. For more on InBiz go to www.inbiz.co.uk

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