BSK-CiC is a Community Interest Company (CIC), based in Rochester, with a team of 53 people and a turnover of +£4M. We are dedicated to supporting Small and Medium Size Enterprises (SMEs) to develop and grow; to be able to create new jobs and be prepared for a low carbon future. Our mission is to inspire people about tomorrow’s world and equip them to succeed.
How do we achieve this?
High Growth Business Coaching: The Kent Innovation and Growth Team all have direct commercial experience of what high growth companies need to succeed and are able to provide this in an unbiased, impartial way. They provide a company with ‘thinking time’ and through their commercial networks draw in the relevant financial, IP, market and technical support.
Business Start Up programmes, consultancy and delivery of support: The BSK-CiC team have created, tested and run for clients a number of start up and pre start programmes that have been adopted both regionally, nationally and in Europe. Earlier this year our ‘Business Start’ programme was launched in Belgium and the online version of Enterprise Taktix has just been translated into Spanish. Previous work in Kent expanded business start up support to 3000 people per annum, with one of the most successful formats achieving a 95% business start up rate! We are currently updating our ‘Social Enterprise Success’ programme to look at how this could support the increasing number of communities looking to take on previously public sector activity.
EU project Management and delivery of business support: We specialise in the areas of Sustainability/Low Carbon, Internationalisation and Enterprise and currently acting as lead or partner on 16 EU projects. We have delivered support to over 20,000 companies in the last five years, and are networked into partnerships across South East, London, Belgium, France, Netherlands, Germany and through the Enterprise Europe Network a further 44 country partners. We work directly with SMEs to help support our vision of helping to ‘prepare businesses for tomorrow’ and have seen major successes in energy/carbon reduction, development of innovative products, export and trade and business growth.
EU Bid Writing and EU Project Monitoring: We have written many bids over the last 15 years and have developed huge expertise in successfully drawing down EU funding. We offer this service to partners and are currently supporting several groups with bids that will bring additional funding to the area. We also specialise in monitoring and project evaluation and have a team of five experts working in this area.
Doing Business: through our hugely successful Kent 2020 event each April we provide the opportunity for 4000 small businesses to meet 350 exhibitors and do business! We also offer Profit Network, our adviser support to small companies, with a special focus on how to access finance.
For more details about funded business support, our work and how we can help please go to support@bsk-cic.co.uk.