A day in the life of a Micro Entity in Sussex. Today in our cosy little world we began to imagine that we were actually a Small Company with dreams of becoming a medium sized enterprise one day. I realise that this is pure gobbledygook to most people. This is the business equivalent of explaining the off-side rule to a elderly relative. Not only will it take a long time but at the end of the process, no one will feel any better for the hard work. However our day spent imagining was important at the beginning of our Financial Year.

The Micro Entity is defined as employing 1-9 Employees and having a Turnover of less than €2M. The great thing about businesses such as ours is that we can work in a way that larger companies could never dream. Its not that we can afford to waste resources, indeed the very opposite, but we don’t realise our own limitations. We can take the entire workforce out for a drink or hold a BBQ and no one would realise we are an entire Company. We can all remember what it was like to work on our own or in a simple partnership, yet thanks to the leadership of one person, we are able to apply ourselves body and soul to specific projects knowing that all of us will watch one another’s backs. There is rarely any need for memos, and we really can have a Company wide Conference Call. There is no real redundancy (in the right sense of the word) but we do know where we can go if we need extra labour to get a job done. A great deal of our work comes from word of mouth and apart from me, there is no one who would contemplate calling themselves a salesman.

There are plenty of barriers to our micro entity becoming a Small Company. The simplest to resolve is that of turnover or staff list. We are bordering on the Small Company in terms of Employees, but sadly a bit far off the pace in terms of turnover. However increasing our turnover (which will depend on having more employees because of our business model) is reliant in part in increasing the number or size of our public sector contracts. One of the biggest barriers to this is for us to be able to register on a number of the public sector procurement frameworks on which the Government depends to cut its own procurement costs. The challenge is that each framework we approach, announces with only a short window within which to respond offers yet another set of criteria, which we as a Micro Entity lack the capacity to achieve. At each stage, we manage to hit the previous target, yet the current target is always a few steps away, yet our ability to predict the next level of complexity seems no better. Of course the Medium Sized Enterprises (and few Large Companies) that are registered and have no shortage of eligible contracts, are large enough and rich enough to buy in the talent they need, even at short notice.