True strength is found in #TeamNEN

Posted on February 03, 2017

Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.

Henry Ford

Proud to be part of #TeamNEN

You may not know it already, but we’re a proud member of the National Enterprise Network. As a member of this network, we’re one organisation of many serving the enterprise support sector. Individually we are all working hard to support new and established small and medium sized enterprises. But did you know that collectively we are part of a network that covers the whole of England, and last year provided advice, support and training to 80,631 clients? 

We’d like to share with you a few more numbers that were collected from members of the NEN network during 2015/2016. They say that strength is found in numbers, so we hope that by sharing these numbers with you, you will see the impact that our organisations, and others belonging to the NEN network are having on our sector.

While we’re all busy supporting a lot of brand new businesses, a lot of the NEN network members have been in existence for quite some time. In fact, together, we have been trading for 1,757 years – that’s quite a sizeable bank of acquired knowledge! The network is made up of 1, 686 people working in client facing roles and supported by 364 non-executive directors.

When it comes to the type of clients the network support, their approach is completely inclusive. We all know there’s no such thing as a typical entrepreneur, and for the network, there’s no such thing as a typical client. Last year, the NEN network supported clients where 51% were female and 18% were from an ethnic background.

There’s a common misconception that all entrepreneurs are aged under 40. Not in our network!

Last year 21% were aged 16-29, 56% were aged 30-49 and 23% were over 50. What about the benefits on offer to NEN member clients? For starters, there’s access to a loan book worth over £66 million and over 1.6 million square feet of office space. But if a client doesn’t need physical work space, they could join one of over 1500 clients making use of virtual office facilities. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, clients who get support from an NEN member can look forward to an average one year survival rate of 86% During 2015/2016, NEN members helped clients launch 9,339 new businesses and create 10,130 jobs.

We’re proud to be part of #TeamNEN. In these challenging times, being part of this network is really important to us, because together we are delivering real impact to our clients