Financial Focus key to sustainable development of County Carlow Small to Medium Enterprises
Carlow Companies invited to Profit Academy Taster during Local Enterprise Week 2020
“County Carlow companies should focus on their financial health in order to support sustainable development” says Pauline Hoctor , Senior Enterprise Development Officer with Carlow County Council’s – Local Enterprise Office speaking about a new opportunity for County Carlow companies to participate in the new “Profit Academy” business development programme launched today (21st February 2020) .
The programme which has been designed as part of a new suite of competitive development programmes unique to County Carlow gives companies a chance to develop their in-house capacity to build capacity and understanding in their financial health which will help them to grow and develop. Hoctor continued to say, “the genesis of the development of this new programme was firstly our direct research with over 1200 County Carlow companies who engaged with our business development programmes in 2019 and also as building on the recommendations of the OCED report by Department of Business, Enterprise and Innovation”. The OCED report identifies that “Financial skills and vision are a key element of the competences required by entrepreneurs and small business owners for growing their ventures and appear to be one of the constraints to the greater use of external finance among Irish SMEs”.
The programme will be delivered by the expert team at Bridgewater Consulting. Billy O’Connor trainer and mentor explained that “we plan to cover a host of relevant topics such as: cash flow, costing and pricing strategies, state supports, proper financial records and forms, proper procedures for employing people, manage bank positions and how to deal effectively with them, sales and profit growth. The programme is unique in that each company will attend 3 x 1-day training sessions and will have four mentoring sessions each. This will enable you to apply the learning to YOUR business and get your team involved in the decision making”. O’Connor concluded by saying that “We are also including a one-day session for all participating companies' staff (up to 3 each), covering the topic of “Finance for Non-Finance” managers so that the entire team are "on the same page" when it comes to finance. Bridgewater will apply one of our guiding principles throughout, namely, "sales is vanity and profit is sanity, however, cashflow is reality".
A free taster session of the programme is being hosted during Enterprise Week on 5th March 2020 and Carlow Companies are encouraged to sign up today. Speaking about the programme Kieran Comerford, Head of Enterprise with the Local Enterprise Office said “we are delighted to collaborate with Bridgewater in the development of this new programme which has been designed based on our experience of supporting the County Carlow business eco-system over the past 5 years. Comerford continued to say , as part of the programme companies will carry out a financial health check which will highlight and measure current baseline metrics, both financial and process KPIs, which will also be compared at the end of the programme and for future targeting to assess impact”. Comerford encourages those that are interested to attend the taster session on March 5th so Carlow businesses can sign up to a programme that is assured to change the way they financially manage your business.
.
To Sign up to the taster session log onto https://www.localenterprise.ie/Carlow/Training-Events/Online-Bookings/LE6019-The-Profit-Academy-Taster-Session-5th-Mar.html.
Ends
For further information contact - Pauline Hoctor, SEDO, LEO Carlow phoctor@carlowcoco.ie 086-4109079
OECD Report:
https://dbei.gov.ie/en/Publications/Publication-files/A-Road-Map-for-SME-and-Entrepreneurship-Policy-in-Ireland.pdf
