Welcome

SFEDI Solutions works with a diverse range of organisations in the public, private and ‘third’ sector to provide enterprising solutions for the challenges and opportunities faced in enhancing the quality of support and learning available to small and home based-businesses.

Building upon the work and track record of SFEDI over the last 15 years in improving the access for prospective and existing entrepreneurs to personal and business development that works in practice, SFEDI Solutions has three core services:

• Standards setting and research – As the government recognised UK standards setting body for enterprise and business support, SFEDI Solutions maintains and reviews the set of business enterprise and business support standards.  The development of the standards are informed by undertaking applied or ‘engaged’ research projects addressing different aspects of small business and enterprise development
• Development and delivery – SFEDI Solutions works across a range of different sectors, such as further and higher education and community development, in advising, shaping and delivering demand-led support and learning opportunities for small and home-based businesses
• Advocacy – Staff from SFEDI Solutions actively contribute to a number of key national and international networks focused on enhancing the quality of support and learning available to small businesses.  These include the ACCA SME Committee, ACT, International Enterprise Promotion Conference and the UK Mentoring Taskforce.

Why SFEDI Solutions?

As they say, we live in varied times for supporting enterprise and learning and skills in small businesses.  There are a number of proposed changes to support structures, a lack of clarity about what these changes mean in practice, a greater emphasis on ‘localisation’, de-centralisation, commercialisation of public services and self-help.  These changes are throwing up a range of questions and areas of ‘need to know’ including:

• How do we find out about the needs of small businesses and entrepreneurs in terms of the types of skills and learning they require
• How do we encourage businesses to learn from each other?
• How do we ensure that business owner-managers have the appropriate abilities and skills to mentor and support other businesses?
• How do we support the development of staff in the organisation to provide high-quality services with less resource?
• What are the learning and skills needs of managers and other professionals related to the commercialisation of public services?
• How can we recognise the learning of new groupings of prospective owner-managers as part of re-training or redundancy programmes?