The first month of the new Enterprise Nation platform: What have small businesses been getting up to?

The groundbreaking new Enterprise Nation business support platform launched a month ago today and thousands of small business owners have already got stuck in! Let's take a look at what they've been up to.

In the most significant moment in Enterprise Nation's 13-year history, we launched the new platform on 3 April in partnership with ICAEW.

It enables our decade of work delivering support to small businesses to scale and better connect you to the resources required to get ahead.

The new-look Enterprise Nation gives you 24/7 access to other business owners and advisers, plus a decade's worth of content in the form of blog posts, webinars, podcasts, videos, eBooks and guides.

Members also now have a personal dashboard to track activity such as advisers you've engaged with, events you're attending and have attended, content you've consumed and services you've uploaded.

We know that businesses who take advice grow faster than those who don't, but so many business owners don't get support. It's because they don't know who to trust and how much they'll be expected to pay.

We're putting that right with information-packed and review-led profiles for business advisers so you can feel confident about making a choice about who to get advice from.

The statistics

Since launch, an impressive 167 adviser services have been added to the platform so you know exactly how much you need to pay to access their expertise.

And only four weeks in, 22 service engagements, where small business owners contacted advisers for free consultation calls and custom services, have already taken place.

One of the most exciting new features is the Discovery Tool.

Answer a series of questions about your business and we'll serve you with recommended content, advisers and special offers to help you deal with the exact things you need to deal with.

A total of 146 business reviews have been taken using this new feature and 118 businesses have accessed the digital business MOT through Enterprise Nation's partnership with TSB.

There have been more than 120,000 page views on Enterprise Nation since the launch and there have been over 2,300 individual searches by members across the site including the blog, the member only content area for webinars, videos, ebooks and presentations and the people section where you make connections with other business owners and advisers.

Popular search terms include:

• GDPR

• SEO

• exporting

• alternative finance

• grow an online business

• start a food business

And if you need an accountant, Enterprise Nation is the place to be! A total of 609 ICAEW accountants are on the platform ready to help you start and grow a great business.

Emma Jones, founder of Enterprise Nation, said: "It's early days, and we've done little to promote the new site, and yet businesses are already diving straight in to find advice and hook up with fellow founders to exchange ideas and experience. It is just wonderful.

"We are committed to developing and delivering a new, more dynamic way of providing business support to the five million small businesses that operate in the UK. We've made a good start and to see it this active in such a short space of time suggests we're hitting the right spot.

"We aimed from the outset to build a platform that will ensure every small business in the UK can get access to world-leading support on demand in a form that's convenient and affordable for them, we are delighted to say that progress is already being made on this vision."

Web design adviser and founder of Rocketship WP, Jamie Hewitt is an early adopter of Enterprise Nation's new platform features.

He said: "The new platform is a fantastic new addition to the Enterprise Nation toolkit. Almost immediately after the launch I had a new prospect contact me about my services.

"Setting up my adviser account took a matter of minutes. The email notifications are also intuitive and the platform makes it very easy to respond to enquiries in a timely manner.

"One of the best things has been my ability to showcase collaborative work with Enterprise Nation as it really helps to engender trust with potential new clients by illustrating my breadth of skills.

"All in all, it's very clever, well thought out, and perfectly sums up the Enterprise Nation ethos: savvy support to build your business skills, build your network of business contacts, and build your business's bottom line - all at the same time."

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