Good Growth Guidelines

Helping small businesses work and grow with purpose

Growth Platform is the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority’s (LCRCA) business support service designed to support business leaders to grow and develop.

Good Growth Guidelines

Helping small businesses work and grow with purpose

Growth Platform is the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority’s (LCRCA) business support service designed to support business leaders to grow and develop.

We helped them to

Create practical guidance for delivering good growth across the Liverpool City Region small business community

They help the world by

Providing impactful business support across the city region aligned with good growth values

Firestarters

Public Sector

Stakeholder engagement

Challenge

The old ways of growing a business with no concern for people or the planet are, at best, outdated. We know better than anyone that good growth is possible – we just neep a map to guide us on our way.

But finding that clear, reliable guidance on how to do it has traditionally been as easy as finding a friendly swan. Luckily, there’s Growth for Good, an organisation dedicated to changing the way business works at a regional level. So, to help make that happen, they asked us to produce the first ever guidelines for good growth that spoke to the small business community in their language.

Response

It was a member of our own Firestarters community who lit the fuse on this idea. They suggested there should be a guide aimed at the specific challenges small businesses face – from achieving sustainability and building a diverse team, to forming relationships with local suppliers.

What we created was something that had just as much character and colour as the small businesses we were supporting. At the heart of the guide were 5 key pillars – and the essential actions that make them possible:

Workplace culture – through true equality, diversity and inclusion.
Workplace recruitment – led by an inclusive approach to hiring.
Workplace pay – committing to providing a real living wage
Workplace purchasing – developing a locally-focussed procurement policy
Workplace impact – building a culture of environment awareness

We wanted these ideas to be out there, in the small business world, doing some good. So we delivered a campaign that showed business leaders that good growth was a real possibility for them, no matter where they were in their journey.

Results

Educating and empowering businesses to achieve good growth puts the fire in the Matchstick bellies. It’s the bright, blazing heart of our studio mission, which is probably why the chance to bring these guidelines to life was so rewarding to work on.

We see the Good Growth guidelines as a turning point for small businesses all across the region. Their impact will be to provide business leaders with the support they need to put people and the planet at the heart of how they grow.

Filled with real life examples of good growth in action, the guidelines represent a resource the SME world has never had access to before. And we believe they’re a huge step towards a business community where everything from recruitment, to sustainability, to workplace culture can be driven, profitably, by purpose.