Our Peer to Peer (P2P) communities provide a chance for like-minded entrepreneurs and business people to come together, share knowledge and support one another in an informal setting. We actively facilitate introductions and connections, enabling clients to discover new business opportunities, potential collaborators and suppliers, or get experienced advice and mentoring from seasoned business people.
Research consistently reports that Mentoring and P2P networks are the most trusted source of guidance for small businesses – they want help from someone who has actually been where they are, and who understand the challenges of growing a business.
We have active P2P communities and activities within all of our projects, and in both of our e-learning platforms, Outset Online – for start-ups and new companies, and GrowSmart for established businesses. We also have P2P Mentor communities, some dedicated to addressing the general gap in business, such as for the British Business Bank Mentorsme programme.
Our Accelerating Women’s Enterprise and Enterprising Women services utilise mentors specifically to help overcome both the under-representation of women owned businesses in our economy, and maximise their growth potential.
We have created many mentor communities from scratch, using compelling and effective mentor recruitment campaigns utilising our core expertise in business engagement. Some have been at C-Suite level and sector based, such as the industry bioscience mentors engaged in Yorkshire to help the commercialisation of academic IP. Others have been focused on a geographic area, such as the Norfolk Network Mentors, where we recruited over 10,000 hours of donated mentoring time in just over two weeks from a huge variety of local businesses! And some are for specific stages of the enterprise journey, like our New Enterprise Allowance mentors.
If you would like us to animate a peer to peer SME network or mentor community to suit your corporate CSR or social value policy, please just get in touch.
Outset introduced me to Outset Online, which was the perfect alternative to attending workshops, as I had a very young child. It allowed me to work at my own pace and at times that suited me and my family.
Pip Hayler
Founder, Pip Hayler Photography