Entrepreneurs Are Doing It For Themselves

We formed The Gathering to fill some of the space vacated by the demise of our Regional Development Agency and of Businesslink - space which is still rather inadequately occupied by various public sector bodies, semi-public agencies and by bureaucratic membership organisations.

The demise of key incumbents sparked an epiphany. Very few people seemed to be lamenting the demise of various bodies and it struck us that rather than complaining about the mind-boggling waste and irrelevance of just about all "enterprise support", both disbanded and continuing, we could simply move on and create our own self-support network in Manchester and the North West.

Enterprise support is no-one's as of rights - and what more logical font of support than is there than from amidst those engaged in enterprise? Enterprise support can only be defined as such if it is driven by useful action and enterprise policy can only be defined as such if it is developed and actioned by capable and committed people. Otherwise it is just a parallel world of bureaucratic waste.

Here is an update on how The Gathering is progressing:

Friday was the second formal meeting of The Gathering, the self-organising group of entrepreneurs determined to establish a genuine enterprise culture and the appropriate supporting resources.

The new members turned up one by one, confident in their own abilities. They had the demeanour of folk who had survived a few start-up scuffles and who would be as intolerant of boosterist platitudes as they would of abusive preference shares.

We had tons of progress to report on access to capital in the region.

We had tons to report on productive interactions between existing members.

There were exciting plans nailed down to run an occasional start-up fair to stimulate interaction between labour-hungry young tech businesses and job hungry graduates and young people.

We heard from one of our number who had recently been to Copenhagen and marvelled at how the sheer bloody-minded determination of younger generation businesspeople had carved a nascent enterprise culture in a land traditionally flat of any such thing.

We were told of the relentlessly productive enivironment evident in Tel Aviv, where education, state imperatives, traditional culture and ultra-modern technology cohere around ambition and action.

We recongised that making this kind of stuff happen is what we are about and we nodded.

It was a world away from the set pieces and the stylised claimsmaking of the week’s party conference just up the road. This had five star hotels, luxury dining, speech writers……and really not much of a clue of how to take the regions and the SME economy forward (although not quite as disappointing as the previous week’s big party conference which offered no insight whatsover other than an antediluvian Marxist assault on business morality).

We had a borrowed classroom, doughnuts, speaking from the heart and a clear conception of cultural and material enablement.

Enterprise is political and it is wonderfully liberating – and its supporting policy is far, far too important to be led primarily by politicians, or to be allowed to be abstracted and corralled by the dead hand of mediocre public initiatives.

There’s a new enterprise spark in the North West. Ain’t no-one going put it out.

(These are my personal views: The Gathering is neither owned nor led by anyone. Here are more details on the founding principles of The Gathering.)

Malcolm Evans is founder of Funding Enterprise, a specialist business funding and Manchester business angels platform.